


Harry's Room

by katharinewrites



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-21 01:09:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 53,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katharinewrites/pseuds/katharinewrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Repost of a work begun in Dec 2012 based on the prompt: "Harry knows it's fucked up, but he's always more attracted to people who're in relationships: he's had flings with girls who've had boyfriends, or husbands in one case, and he'd had a big crush on Louis when he was with Hannah, and it had only got worse once things got serious with Eleanor.</p>
<p>He's always had a bit of a thing for Zayn, but seeing Zayn happy with Perrie is making him want Zayn like he's never wanted anything. And Zayn's finding it very hard not to fuck Harry with the way Harry's been all over him all of a sudden."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the three people that still give a shit about this work, I'm incredibly sorry for taking forever with it. I had a rather lengthy bout of writer's block, coinciding with utter madness at work, that made writing pretty impossible until recently. Hope you enjoy the conclusion of it.

The assumption about the act of becoming reformed is that you have to want it. That it requires more than half-hearted promises that are broken at the first sign of temptation. It is supposed to feed on pure, driven wanting. The wanting is supposed to be the catalyst to the becoming; it fuels the steps necessary for change in the midst of life choices littered like land mines intent on keeping the status quo.

But Zayn has found that it's not true, that the wanting, alone, doesn't lead the being into existence.

Zayn wants to be reformed. He wants to be more than an idiot seventeen-year-old finally realizing his burgeoning desirableness, caught with naked pictures of the wrong girl on his phone. The boy who hadn't even put up a fight when he was confronted. The boy who thought, "I love you, I love you, I love you," through her hysterical crying, her righteous rage and the inevitable termination of a relationship that his juvenile shortsightedne ss hadn't seen ending. He never said anything in his defense until he was three blocks away from her apartment mumbling, "I'm sorry" to a crossing light. In the three years since then, he knows he could do better than that.

At least, Zayn knew he could when she was around, with her easy, mischievious smile. When he was with her it was easy to forget that he is equal parts lightness and darkness, warring factions that battle each other for supremacy on a near hourly basis. Perrie floated him away from the internal warfare on her whimsical, hair-tossing laugh that always sends a faint smell of raspberries wafting toward his nose.

The eccentric streak in her playfulness mirrors his own so well that he sometimes wondered if the old bullshit adages are true, that love is two bodies inhabiting one soul. When he held her under the canopy of thick, sweaty air still thrumming from the sounds of their breathy moans, and he ran his hands along the side of her naked body pre ssed tightly against his, reform was the only language he understood. But now that she isn't around, and the days since he has last seen her stretch on like miles, the wanting and the being don't coincide.

The boys had all dreaded the nearly year-long tour since it was first announced. The excitement of seeing so many parts of the world fly past plane and tour bus windows was immediately replaced with cautious unease. For Zayn, Louis, and Niall, the year away meant leaving behind people they were building lives around. It harkened back to an earlier time, when men left their sweethearts to be heroes in a Great War, except this war is waged with pop music and screaming fans instead of guns and poison gas.

Perhaps the only one who didn't mind was Liam whose congenial reaction had all but said, "I love being around you all" even though the underlying meaning was, "I don't have anyone waiting at home for me." Harry's reaction read similarly though slight sadness co lored the look. Last year they had all thought it would be different for him this time, that Harry 's blond, red-lipped American star would be the first serious thing he ever had. She won't be among the waiting for him at the end of this marathon tour. She broke his heart at the beginning of the year. Harry still refuses to talk about it.

Seven months and 3 continents later, the tour has nearly worn them down to creatures only capable of the the most basic human functions. They breathe, eat, sleep, and perform, over and over again, until Zayn starts to wonder what separates them from finely tuned, sentient robots. Even their once loving interactions are strained; they're too sick of each other's faces to enjoy true laughs.

It's the monotony that spurs the bad choices even though his wanting is just as intense. He still wanted to change five months ago but a pretty brunette with full lips and doe eyes in Barcelona ruined his resolve. Three months later, after a nasty phone argument with Perrie and nearly a fifth of vodka, he let a pair of blondes that looked vaguely like her with long, deer-thin legs press him into a mattress. He didn't want it any less, a month ago, on one of the precious few days off with the lads at a club in transit between some lesser American cities. It had ended with Zayn pushing a girl away, finally wracked with guilt, but not before she had blown him in the dirty bathroom.

Zayn learns more about the rest of the band through their silence on his exploits than anything they'd ever said. Harry's reticence on the matter is the least surprising. It's not as if infidelity is uncharted territory for him. There was the month-long relationship with a married woman and countless girls whose unavailability didn't stop his pursuit. While Zayn is certain Niall's sightlessness to the matter is less about ambiguous morals, more about general obliviousness, and that Louis has no room to to be judgmental because of a certain tryst in Mexico, it is Liam's broken moral compass that surprises him the most. If there is anything he's sure of it's that Liam is fundamentally good. His non-existent commentary worries Zayn about the person Liam is turning into, what the tour is doing to all of them.

If it did he wouldn't be making up excuses for his distance, feigning prescribed vocal rest when Perrie calls at an inopportune moment, his arms twined around another girl's thigh. He lets the being slip away from him and lets the guilt add up just a little bit more.

Perrie picks up on it after a while, not naive enough to believe that old habits are so easily abandoned. If he takes too long to call her back at night, her voice will hitch and grow strained at the effort of keeping in tears. She'll talk of random men in her entourage with a touch too much interest, even though Zayn knows that her opportunities for outside paramours aren't nearly as numerous as his. In her worst moments s he talks about the girls with the same avid interest, making little lacerations in his heart and inciting miserable arousal as punishment. Then, with a subject change so fast it gives him whiplash she tells him a funny story and they're laughing and it feels like they're back at home, cuddled under a blanket, and everything is untainted again.

For the next month he is good, ignoring fan advances, taking it all out on his hand when he need gets too overwhelming. He is cautiously optimistic that the reform took this time. So the next time Perrie calls, in the middle of the boys' terribly needed down time in Harry's hotel room, he invites her out to see him.

"How many days can you get away?" he asks, putting his finger to his opposite ear to dull the ratatat of fired bullets in the assassin video game that Niall and Liam are playing on the floor in front of the television.

"Not more'n two or three," she says. "Promo for the new single's about to start."

"Get here," Zayn pleads. He turns back to the room, rolls his eyes at Louis who starts making out with the air then seamlessly transitions to mimed fellatio.

"I can't wait see you," she purrs.

"Neither can I," he says, sincerely meaning every syllable. He can already feel the effects of her impending visit, a slight buzz making him stupidly giddy.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Harry watching him intently as he hangs up. He is lying on his bed, languidly presiding over the activities with one arm tucked under his head, pulling up the edge of his white t-shirt. It exposes a snatch of pale skin over his hip, the top edge of his boxer briefs. He turns his face to the ceiling when he sees Zayn catch him, swallows.

"Was that Perrie?" Harry asks.

"Of course it was our dear boy's lover," Louis says in an overly affected way, like a movie star from some other time.

Liam shudders. "You have to stop saying that."

Louis takes the opp ortunity to repeat "lover" over and over in Liam's direction, slinking closer on each after subsequent time. When Louis is a barely a few inches away from his ear, Liam pauses his player and playful tackles Louis, frantically clamps his hand over Louis' mouth. Niall, innocently caught in the crossfire yelps when one of their elbows shoves him away, ruining his aim.

Above them, Zayn sees a transient expression skitter across Harry's face before it's replaced with his typical, unreadable blankness.

"Are you lot going to play or do I get my turn now?" Harry asks.

They right themselves, resume the game, as Louis makes a comment about Harry's unnecessary moodiness. Zayn moves to return to the place he had been occupying on the floor before the call but it seems too crowded now. He goes toward a love seat pushed up near the window but Harry stops him.

"Here," Harry says, patting an empty spot on the bed.

"It's okay," he replies, negotiating a path t hrough the stretched out limbs of the others en route to the love seat. When he sits he realizes that at this angle he can barely make out what is going on in the game but he doesn't mind. His mood is so buoyant with the promise of Perrie's visit that he wouldn't be able to concentrate on it.

He thinks of her, as the self-conscious sense of being watched grows. Harry's glances come at regular intervals until Zayn look back. He holds his gaze, tries to determine if Harry looks sick or sad or some horrible combination of both of them.

"Next?" Louis asks and holds up a controller. Harry takes it, slinks to the floor to play while Zayn stares out the window and daydreams about soft, pale skin and lavender, raspberry-scented hair.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry never means for it to define his love life, for it to be vise-like in it's grip on him. But it is the taken ones, the ones that are off limits, that are all he ever wants. Their inaccessibility, the impossible challenge posed by the pursuit, gives him more of a high than any little pill he's ever been offered in the past few years. It's not that he harbors any ill-feelings toward their relationships, but their wanting feels more meaningful than the kind of wanting he gets from the unattached, and for reasons he can't seem to confront, he needs it.

In a way, it is better if it's an idiosyncratic compulsion. If it's a trait that he inherited from a distant relation, some kind of genetic aberration that makes him this way, he doesn't have to think about what his actions might mean. He's simply being himself and none of it has to say more about him. At least, he hopes it doesn't.

Although he finds he can't trace it to any family member in particular, he can trace the first time it happened, to a sticky, slummy basement party a year before X-Factor had even been an inkling in his mind. He had been feeling low over the demise of a thing with a girl who said she didn't like the way he looked anymore. As the slight buzz from cheap beer had started to blur the edges of his self-consciousness, he had seen a girl with smudged eyeliner and a peculiar, whinnying laugh. She was staring at him from across the room for the better part of an hour, and she had seemed like she would be a sweet, harmless distraction from all the doubt in his head that was starting to gnaw at how he saw himself.

In the low light of stained paper lanterns that had been hung up for mood, he saw the girl lick her lips and steal sideways looks at him from under her honey-brown fringe, though she tried to look engaged in the conversation of the group around her. He recognized her from school as a girl in Year 11. They locked eyes, his mind already picking her up, straddling her legs around him, noting how pretty she might look under him.

Then he saw a boy approach her, duck his head in between their gazes to kiss her, and wrap his arms around her waist with all the familiarity of long-term union. Her arms went to his shoulders, extending past his neck, where they crossed to keep him pressed to her. When they broke away, the boy kept his arm around her waist, protectively. Just like that, the girl was another aborted project. But the night was still early.

The girl's boyfriend finally left her side in the space of time it took for Harry to consume three more beers. The boy had been enticed by the promise of a smoked high from a friend who pressed pinched fingers to his lips and mimed inhalation. Most of Harry's own friends had begun pairing off with faces whose desirableness was revealed by the alcohol. His more inebriated friends paired off with toilets and bushes outside the house. There had been a couple of g irls that had appeared to be possibilities, but they had all scattered through the course of the night. Harry thought he might leave now, see if the playground a few blocks away was still open. He could get on a swing and try to swing himself out of this drunken funk he was in, toward more pleasant feelings.

As he gathered up his jacket, he felt her presence over his shoulder before he saw her. In the time it took him to turn around, he envisioned dozens of smooth opening remarks to preface his excuse for a quick departure.

“Oh, hey,” was all he could manage.

“Hi,” she said.

They stood together, awkwardly expectant, both waiting for the other to say something first.

“So...you off now?” She pointed to his hands, which were readying his jacket.

He nodded.

“You want to come?” he asked, when she looked at him hopefully.

“Yeah,” she said. “Let me just...”

She motioned back toward where she had be en sitting with her friends. He walked back there with her, a step behind. She had to yank a yellow purse and her scarf from under a friend's ass when they didn't react fast enough to her command, their bodies too limp with alcohol, and those little white pills they swallowed.

“Ready,” she said as she wrapped the scarf around her neck.

They left the party together, not speaking another word until they had walked a block in silence.

“I'm Roslyn, Roz, by the way,” she told him, just as the park started to come within sight. It was cool April night and the steam from her mouth puffed out like white clouds in front of her lips.

“Harry,” he said.

“Are we going back to your house?” she asked, confused by the detour he started to make toward the playground.

“No,” he said.

He waited for a car to pass and then crossed in the middle of the street to the opposite side where the pavement gave way to the playground. He saw the low gate was locked from a few paces away, and started to look around for any sign of guards. When he was satisfied there was nobody watching, he lifted a leg over the gate, carefully shifting to straddle it without incurring any damage to himself.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

He shrugged, then lifted his other leg once the first had safely touched ground. He overshot the motion and went falling onto the gate. Pain exploded through his groin and toppled him to the ground behind the gate. He groaned and cupped himself as quietly as he could manage.

“Come play,” he said, still clutching himself in his hands once he had stopped hissing.

She laughed that whinnying laugh and swung her legs over. Harry caught a glimpse of pin- striped pants under her skirt and thought maybe she wasn't as out-of-reach as he had decided.

They made their way to the swing set, where the swings swayed to and fro with a light breeze under the dim med park lights, tripping over corners of playground equipment that seemed to hide from view. Harry plopped himself in the middle swing, the hard seat cold under his jeans, while Roz took the one on his left.

She took off first, pumping the swing and sticking her legs straight in front of her to get more momentum. Her skirt billowed around her legs on and he found himself chasing her, trying to get as high as she could. They were only starting to get a rhythm going, each flying, a little higher than the other when Roz's phone went off. She abruptly dragged her boots on the ground, bringing herself to a stop and fetched the phone out of her purse. Harry let himself swing another time before dragging his feet down.

“Dickhead,” she said, once she looked at her phone. She snapped her phone shut.

“Who? Your boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

He didn't ask her anything more and she didn't offer anything else. She looked at him, then popped off her s wing.

“I'll push you,” she said.

“Okay.”

She went behind him and he waited for her to start pushing him but nothing happened.

“Hey, you...” he started but he was stopped by hands that went over his stomach. Her nose nuzzled his neck and she planted a few light kisses there. He turned his head and she caught his mouth with her own. They went on kissing as her hands traveled down his chest until he pulled back, his neck rebelling against the angle. She went in front of him and straddled him on the swing, legs folded against her thighs, knees bracketing his ass. Then there was unzipping, shifting, repositioning, and her whispering in his ear, “Tell me before you come,” before she began grinding against him. The swing bobbed and swayed with her efforts. Harry concentrated on gripping the chains and keeping them both upright, but his concentration fell at her little hiccuping breaths and he had to grit his teeth to tell her, “Now,” so she could pull off him as he shuddered and came on his lap.

What they had had lasted two weeks. He saw her in school, her limbs twisted around her boyfriend's and all the while he shot her smug, knowing looks. Then she broke up with her boyfriend, and Harry felt any spark he ever felt for her dim and sputter out. It was too intense, having to bear the carcass of the old relationship, so he forgot to check his phone, frequented a different group of parties for a while until the texts and calls stopped coming.

Despite its demise, it is one of the best experiences he has ever had, being with someone who was had someone else and still wanted him. Another might have seen it as a backhanded compliment, and an ultimately futile exercise, but to Harry, it is an addictive bump to his confidence. While everyone else wants to find The One, he just wants to be the one you want in spite of yourself.

Since then, the ones off limits are the ones that he feels a gravit ational pull toward. There are the girls with boyfriends, the guys with girlfriends, the married ones, the ones who insist it's all a very complicated affair with so-and-so. They all intrigue him, his interest growing with the strength and length of their relationship.

Harry moves in and out of these situations with an assassin's subtly. By now, it's routine. He flashes a dimpled smile, tells an off-beat joke that lands just short of funny but manages to get there anyway, and they let him in. They do it without even noticing the way he's unlocking the padlocks over their heart that someone else had placed there. He'd like to think it's come from years of practice, with fine-tuning to match the target's particular needs but he knows it's mostly luck. He barely has to try for them to crack the door, beckon him in.

Once they let him in, they show him where they are weakest and, before they even realize, he starts to stir the pot. There's a lingering touch, a throw away sentence full of double meaning, a roaming look that reminds them of the chase and then they're too far gone. From there, it's only a shuffle of feet and a twisting of limbs and sheets, if they even make it to a mattress in the first place. It'll last like that for a few, glorious weeks and then the complications will arise. There is talk of leaving the other because feelings are getting involved and all he can do is shrug, tell a story that barely has a beginning or end and then the talk subsides in favor of incredulous snorts and “What are you on about?”s.

In another week, though, the talk increases, starts to suffocate his enjoyment of it all, so he makes his exit. It's nothing overly dramatic, just a quiet pulling away. A text will go unanswered, a meeting will suddenly be canceled because of his a vague obligation and he finally breaks away completely. They are left wondering what happened, who did what and where it all went wrong. By then, he's tamperin g with someone else's locks.

Nick once hypothesized, after Harry admitted his proclivity, that the reason he probably likes it so much nowadays is the relative anonymity it grants him. In all the other aspects of his life, he is a gangly six footer with a face and a slouching silhouette that's now recognizable in so many countries, that he can't affect any stealthiness. But in relationships, in the careful dance between two people, or three, once he enters the equation, it is the only domain that he is able to move in and out seamlessly. Harry had shrugged at Nick, choosing to ignore the psychoanalysis and focus on the dinner he was helping him put together.

Harry's success rate increases as a function of the band's continuing success. The media can't keep up, so they call him a womanizer. They're only half right; the truth is more sordid than simple, serial hookups, and women aren't the only ones involved with him in these transient dalliances.

Even the other boys in the band aren't immune. His relationship with Louis had been fraught with strange tension from the first time they had met, but Harry's fascination began in earnest when he watched Louis with Hannah. Fleeting touches and kisses between them had Harry looking for excuses to be around Louis, finding ways to get his hands on him that went beyond normal teenage rough-housing. As Louis' relationship with Hannah, came to its conclusion, Harry's interest in him flagged but it came roaring back with a vengeance when Eleanor entered the scene. Louis kept pushing him back, insisting nothing was going on between them, despite the little ways he still wound Harry up.

The farthest Louis had ever let it get was on a drunken night, when stir-craziness from non-stop promotional touring had revealed sides of the boys that had been deeply tucked away. Louis let him suck his cock but stopped him partway through, so he could pull up a picture of Eleanor on his phone to con centrate on. It wasn't long after that he was sputtering, “Haz, fuck, Haz,” and coating the back of Harry's mouth with come. It only took a few friendly strokes to throw Harry over the edge, thinking that even though it was Eleanor's coy smile Louis needed to see, it was Harry's lips and tongue that were doing the work, Harry's eyes Louis had look into before his head fell back.

An edginess descended on their interactions after that night, neither as relaxed around each other as before. It was the first time he had ever felt that perhaps karmic justice was finally catching up with him.

Then came the last time he had tried it and it's miserable backfiring. He succeeded easily enough, it was rare that he didn't, but it morphed on him and suddenly his feelings were involved in ways they never had been before.

She was dating someone from an American dynasty, a family Americans claimed was their version of royalty, descendants of some felled president. He had stepped in and played his role with the usual deftness. Things proceeded as they normally did, except when the complications arose, and she left her relationship, Harry had let her. He stayed with her despite it all, and there was the little thing about publicity that kept his handlers into pressing the issue to stay together and go public.

It was looking like it might almost be the first serious thing he could be capable of having. But he wasn't capable of seriousness, not like Louis, or Liam were. Perhaps he was only capable of Zayn's kind of seriousness, where he had one arm firmly around his girlfriend's waist, while the other desperately reached to anyone else.

There was a big fight, something that started off as a benign disagreement, and transformed into a condemnation of all his faults because he wasn't giving her enough shimmering, fairytale moments. She declared the end of their union and he was glad, lifted by it, because he didn't have to do i t first.

“You'll always be lost,” she told him the last time they parted for good. Her red lips grazing his cheek as she spoke, in their farewell embrace.

“What?” he asked, but she only smiled and left.

It was a throwaway line, something said to give the situation dramatic finality, but it bothered him. Harry sullenly contemplated her words and wondered if it was possible she knew more than he did about himself. He let the others think she broke his heart, accepting their pats on the back and meager verbal condolences, when all he wanted to know was if they thought he was lost too.

Harry had tried, in vain, to work off the sting of it. He'd even resorted to asking the fans he brought up to his hotel rooms if they were involved. When they invariably told him no, startled by the question, he begged them to say they were taken while he fucked them. One enterprising girl said she was married. He didn't know if she had lied or not, but the admis sion set him off so quickly, he came before she uttered the last consonant.

They were all palliative forays that left him satisfied for a few hours but the boredom would set in, because they were poor substitutions for the long-chosen, long-watched targets he usually pursued. Then boredom turned into resentment, because maybe she was right. Maybe he would always be lost and she knew it before he did.

With this last leg of the tour, her words are even more prophetic than he initially realizes. The band is all so tired of each other, even more exhausted by the tour dates management keeps tacking on, to capitalize on the near fever-pitch of global fascination with them. He can't talk to the other boys, even if he could find the words to say what he feels, because they're all at their own breaking points. Liam is on the makeup-breakup merry-go-round with Danielle for the fourth time in as many months; Louis is avoiding him and lashing out at fans on Twitter, becaus e a platonic touch during their “They Don't Know About Us” performance from two concerts ago has fans calling for Eleanor's head on a stick; and Niall is so homesick that he's starting to worry the others with his recent, extensive partying which lasts all night and results in him being carried back to their hotel rooms and tour buses like a pale corpse. And there's Zayn trying so hard to avoid temptation and failing at every turn.

One night after a show, Harry catches Zayn with his hands wrapped around a petite redhead's waist, steering her back to a dark corner of the venue, and he laughs because it's like he and Zayn are opposite ends of the same coin. They are both fighting preoccupation with the boundaries of relationships. Maybe being with each other would meet the shitty deficiencies in both of them.

The minute he thinks it, he laughs it off, but the thought recurs to him every day for the next two weeks. It is an idea that would have made more sense over a year ago, a natural progression of because of those weeks in Australia, when their friendship had stoked and caught fire. Now it seems like a tragically late afterthought.

Harry always found Zayn attractive; he had eyes to know there was something special about the way Zayn's features came together to make up his face. But Australia had him truly noticing the twinkling glint in his eyes when he was on the pull and the shape of his lips standing out against the dark scruff that he would let grow for days on end before he shaved or how he had sunk to his knees and insinuated himself between a girls' legs one night in the elevator, while Harry was being attended to by his own conquest. Zayn's mouth came away glistening with some of her wetness when they reached their floor, and Harry had couldn't remember why the girls were there, or why he and Zayn had to go their separate ways, to separate rooms.

Thinking back on Australia reawakens some of the infatuatio n with him has Harry noticing things like how Zayn's head tilts back, eyes closed as he produces a lengthy note, and it stirs up fantasies in the worst way.

Sometimes he overhears Zayn's Skype conversations with Perrie and sometimes Harry, can't help it, and he listens with an ear pressed against the wall. When they aren't fighting, he hears Zayn describe all the ways and places he wants her, hears Perrie's little moans and everything she insists he's in for the next time she sees him, and then Zayn is coming, and Harry's hands are grabbing his own dick because he's nearly coming in his jeans at the way Zayn's biting back groans, and how wrong this all is.

The infatuation grows so quickly, that after a few days it doesn't seem as crazy to try with Zayn. So the last time he sees Zayn with that look in his eyes, the mixture of shell-shock and hunger, that always precedes the pull, and how forlorn Zayn looks as he straightens the front of his jeans and waves goodb ye to the latest girl, Harry decides that his plan couldn't hurt. It might be the only way to fix both of them.


	3. Chapter 3

**SEATTLE**  
Zayn thinks they’ve lied to him. All he had heard for the last few shows is that Seattle’s weather is exactly like London’s. It is supposed to be brutally overcast, with stretches of misting rain that makes you starved for sunnier days.

He is expecting to be overwhelmed by the shit weather that will make it feel like America is giving them a farewell of sorts, a weather pattern reminder of a home the majority of them haven’t seen in months. Home is still two shows away and then this leg of the tour will be over. That is, until the stretch of performances in Australasia. The break will be amazing though the boys know there’s a strong likelihood that as soon as their plane touches down at Heathrow, there will be another bunch engagements set up for them. The grind is endless these days, but then Zayn thinks of the opposite, of what his life could have been if he hadn’t gotten on a stage three years ago and tried his luck, and he is slightly comforted.

As the tour bus moved north up the coast, leaving the beautiful California sunshine behind, all that continued to stretch out ahead of them is blue-skied splendor. At first it was a relief, clouds always make him more tired and it is the last thing he needs on this exhausting tour. Now he wishes for a bit of the rain, would love any sign that this will be over soon enough.

He thinks about the end, again, as he watches the white lines on the highway that the SUV barrels down. The tinted windows make everything look even more darkly tinged than it truly is, accelerating the actual on-coming darkness that is bearing down on the city as the hour slides to eight o’clock. It tricks Zayn's eyes, his body, into sleepiness. But he'll see her in a few minutes and then it won't matter how dark it is outside because she glows like embers at the end of a lit cigarette.

With every sign they pass on the highway, heralding the airport, his heart rat e ups itself another notch. Its pitter-patter is drumming out a pulsing rhythm as they pull into the airport. He gets a text that says "Landed :)" from her, a moment later, and his hands are trembling when he replies, "B there soon x."

He reconfirms with Lonnie, one of the American drivers they've hired, what exit Perrie would be walking through. Lonnie tells him he’s got it and leads the car the car to their spot.

The first thing Lonnie ever tells anyone is that he has "a touch of sugar diabetes," in an accent that delights the boys because of its mix of Southern American English and French. It is bookended by his chuckle that transforms halfway into a hacking cough. No one ever comments that every time they come back to the States, he looks just a little bit worse than before.

Because of his incredible sense of discretion, his ability to be quiet about all of the boys' best and worst moments on the road, the band’s management continually hires Lonnie whenever they're in America. Over the months, Lonnie has seen Zayn, all of the lads, in countless compromised positions that another might have sold to any of the tabloids around the world, that were desperate to make easy cash off of the gossip. All the while, Lonnie waits, watches silently and then quietly averts his eyes when anything gets too serious. No shred of judgment ever passes over his face, no matter the situation.

Lonnie is often called to assist with transportation needs that require most prudence. He is the perfect person to come along with Zayn on this particular outing. He won't give away any of the nights Zayn’s hand snaked into another girl's pants on these same seats while he frantically dragged his teeth against her neck, because he was angry at himself for doing this again.

Ordinarily, Lonnie would drive up to one of the back exits that Perrie could use to get to the car and avoid being seen, exits that Zayn and the lads are so used to using these days. But the record label has decided the extra press would be good for Little Mix, as they struggle to find footing in the States. They are hopeful a sweet embrace will increase downloads, increase buzz, and stop them from stagnating in the middle of the charts. So Zayn will meet her at a more public exit, with carefully chosen paparazzi that will capture this reunion that he wishes could be done in private.

When Zayn first brought up the possibility of Perrie’s visit, managers on both sides tried to talk him out of it, claiming a visit at this time would be detrimental to both bands’ promotional schedules. Zayn had lashed out so viciously that it shut them up immediately. Not to be outdone, his managers decided to make their reunion into a circus, knowing that he hates having to do this kind of thing. It’s their assertion of dominance, a reminder that Zayn signed a contract that makes him their property, and he knows it.

Lonnie pulls up to a part of a corner of the parking lot behind a pillar, whose shadow casts the front half of the SUV in darkness. He rolls the window down and sees the handful of photographers perched at different angles to the moving doors. They joke with one another and twist the lenses on their cameras as they make idle conversation. Zayn doesn't have to wait more than ten minutes before he gets another text from Perrie, "comin out now xx" and he climbs out of the car, saying, “Be right back" to Lonnie.

Though Paul has to be with the others, they sent another bodyguard in his stead, one of the men who will be at the venue tomorrow night. He is quiet, aside from his introduction earlier, with a name that Zayn’s already forgotten, and he resembles a bull. He follows Zayn toward the doors, a few paces behind to allow for better photo opportunities, but close enough to lunge for anyone who might try something stupid.

Zayn hears the flutter of the camera flashes go off in fra ntic snaps as he approaches the glass double doors. He sees a pair of teen girls, waiting for a taxi with their family, do a double take before an "omigod!" comes screeching out of their mouths. Other rumpled travelers stop and crane their necks at the hoopla that’s beginning to unfold.

He sees Perrie a moment later, pulling a small rolling suitcase and a tote bag, purple hair billowing out behind her. Her smile is wide and toothy when she finally sees him and Zayn feels the crushing guilt of all the others he's had in the time since he has seen her knock the air out of his lungs.

The teen girls and some others who he knows aren’t fans but take still pictures because of herd fascinationXXX, join the photographers in taking pictures, phones raised while their fingers tap the screens over and over. Zayn doesn't miss the wisp of hurt in Perrie's eyes when she sees attention shift to him, and barely transfer to her by proxy. The flashes continue to go off, when he reaches her, grasps her to him, and gives her a small smile before he kisses her. Her arms go around his neck, while one of his hands tangles in her hair and presses the base of her skull, for more leverage.

It's been so long since he's kissed anyone and it almost seems strange, being this physically close to someone and meeting their lips instead of turning his face away. He doesn't kiss any of the girls he hooks up with on the road. Kissing would make it real and they aren't real, not the way he and Perrie are real. They're placeholders for her, a way to work off some of the stress of tour and some of the fog that can’t be alleviated by his hand.

It's a prolonged kiss that he feels her pull away from first. He kisses her forehead before grabbing her hand and leading her toward the car. More people grow curious and start moving toward them so he pulls her along quickly. Out of the corner of his eye, Zayn can see the bodyguard extend his fleshy arm to keep an excited fan from getting too close. Perrie practically bounces to the car, thrumming with that happy energy he's only now realizing he has missed so much. Lonnie is already outside with the trunk unlatched and greets her with a warm smile and a few mumbled niceties before taking her suitcase.

Zayn opens the door for her and they climb into the second row of seats in the SUV to give themselves more privacy. He has barely hit the seat when she grabs him and kisses him again. It's far less chaste than the kiss outside, and he can distantly hear more photos going off where paparazzi point their cameras through the windshield. Her tongue duels his for so long he has to pull away before his hands start looking for places more interesting than the small of her back. He smiles at her and shakes his head when she goes in for more. Up close he can see that she is in full publicity regalia, complete with lashes and a fluorescent pink lipstick that he's sure he's half-wearing now.

Lonnie backs out of the parking lot and carefully moves around the photographers, guiding the car to the highway. On their way back, Perrie talks animatedly of what she and the girls have been up, the people they've met and all the places they've had to peddle their music. It sounds like his life a year ago, and he can only hope she'll see similar success, even though there's a part of him that isn't sure it will happen. That part of him he keeps hidden from her and only rears its head when she starts making covert accusations about his fidelity, like it’s relevant to the matter.

Perrie stops in the midst of her rundown of events, interrupted by buzzing. She looks through her bag and produces her phone. Zayn sees Leigh-Anne’s name above a photo of her and Perrie hugging each other and smiling, as the phone continues to buzz. He tries not to bristle.

“Helloooo?” Perrie yodels as she answers. She dissolves into a fit of giggles a moment later. “Yeah I got here fine, I texted you when I landed!”

Leigh-Anne is a bit wary around him. Whether it’s because she’s smartening up to the rumors about his illicit liaisons that keep reappearing or whether it’s because of that peculiar way that she looks at Perrie sometimes, Zayn’s not sure. She’s the only one of the girls to treat him to a lukewarm shoulder and a watchful eye. Jade’s nothing but friendly, and there was that night when he and a drunken Jesy stumbled into a bathroom and he fingered her against a stall door while she kept moaning, “This is wrong, this is so wrong” into the crook of his neck over and over. Now Jesy sings his praises, talks of his faithfulness like he’s invented the concept, whenever the girls are asked about him and Perrie as her own personal penance.

“I miss you already, too!” Perrie says, after a few more minutes of filling in Leigh-Anne on the flight and the airport photos. “I love you, too. See you in a few days, babes!”

When she hangs up and pulls her phone away from her ear, Zayn kisses with all the passion he can muster, like he’s trying to make her forget something. He can’t be tell what that is. They’re both breathing unevenly when the kiss concludes.

"So, I'm on break tonight. What do you want to do?"

"Honestly? Sleep. I’m so jetlagged," she says. She burrows her head deeper onto his chest.

He snorts, the idea of sleep sounding deliriously wonderful. "You’re perfect.”

"Naturally," she says. In a few minutes she's drifted off to sleep, mouth open with tiny little sighs escaping every so often. Zayn watches the space needle come into view. It’s quiet moments like this, with this evidence of her trusting love, that all the other girls he has been with over the course of their relationship roll through his mind like sepia-tinged memories and he hates himself the most.

 

When they get back to the hotel, they run into the other boys. Niall, Louis and Liam crowd her, mostly sharing their delight in seeing her again. Harry hangs back, watching from the sidelines and looking vaguely annoyed. Zayn looks at him with an unspoken question but then he sees Perrie is smiling up at him out of the corner of his eye and he forgets what he was even wondering about. Harry disappears into his room an instant later.

When the cordialities die down, Zayn steers her into his room and finally they’re alone, backs pushing against the door, exhausted but thrilled.

“Race ya,” she says with a wink as she drops her bags. Then she’s rushing toward the bed at full throttle. Zayn catches up with her handily enough, wraps his arms around her midsection and crashes onto the bed with her in hand. They both laugh as they hit the sheets.

They play fight, Perrie wrapping her legs around his waist and subduing him momentarily before he’s flipped her and got her underneath him. It brings them mouth-to-mouth, her hands grabbing fistfuls of his hair, giggling from time to time when he grinds down against her, so hard it’s almost painful for both of them.

Unlike the others, he doesn’t need more from her, the moment he finds a hard surface to prop them up. This is enough for him, just the lazy back and forth of their sweet, exploratory kisses, with the intermittent, fitful, buck of his hips against her that he can’t fully prevent.

They roll apart and she divests herself of the cardigan, her shorts, and leggings and furrows under the covers. Zayn follows in suit, curving his body against hers.

In a minute she’s asleep, from hyperactivity to somnolence in moments, and even though he’s a little bleary from all of the deep kisses and of the rhythmic friction, he’s perfectly content to be with her just like this.

 

Zayn wakes up to Perrie’s ass grinding against his cock in slow circles. It’s a friendly kind of rocking that he lets her do for a few more minutes, while he’s still fighting his way to consciousness, before it gets to be excruciating.

He disentangles himself from their spooning and moves on top of her, pressing a heavy kiss onto her mouth.

“Didn’t realize you were awake,” she says sarcastically, lips grazing his, when they’ve broken the kiss that leaves them both a little dizzy and breathless.

“I’m good at fooling you,” he tells her and tries his best not to wince at the truth in that statement.

She nods, anyway, with a half smile and eyes that are a little bit unfocused as he moves down her body, pulling the covers down with every inch he travels. When he meets the apex of her thighs, he settles himself there, nudging her legs apart. She’s not shy, never has been, and opens for him with only the barest suggestion.

Zayn kisses her clit through her underwear, feeling a bit of the wetness that’s seeped through the fabric on his lips. She makes a sweet noise in the back of her throat and he hooks his fingers in the sides of her panties and pulls at them. She angles her hips off the bed to aid him in getting them off. He rises on his knees to pull them off, as she kicks her legs to slide her ankles and feet through out of them.

He hesitates before he goes back in, lets his eyes take her in, linger where she’s rosy and wet. She raises herself up on her elbows and watches him watching her. In his periphery he can see her expression change, her right hand arm coming off of the mattress and snaking down her torso. It stops its travels at her clit and he breathlessly waits for her next move.

She moves her forefinger and middle finger in agonizingly slow circles. It’s so quiet in the room he can hear the minute changes in her breathing, as her fingers coax more wetness out of her. Her eyes never leave his face the entire time, and Zayn can feel his lips part, when she inserts one of h er fingers into herself. It’s another few movements and she removes her hand, slick with her wetness.

She holds out the fingers for him and he pulls her hand as he leans in to them and licks at the sweetness of her. He sucks at each finger once, twice, and moves to the next one. He releases her hand, lets her use the moisture his mouth has given her fingers, to tweak her nipples into pink points.

Zayn leans into her, where she’s spread, uses his hands to spread her even further and flicks his tongue over her once in introduction. She squirms at first but bucks her hips into the next exploration of his tongue, grabbing his hair to keep him pressed where he was.

He goes on alternating vertical and horizontal wags of his tongue, while she makes small little cries that come with increasing frequency as he buries a finger inside of her. He pulls away from her, still pushing her to the edge with the thrusts of his hand, and tries to move himself up so that he can lower his mouth over her breasts which are thrown up as her back arches, begging for attention. She whines a little and rocks her hips and he thinks he’ll get to them later so he returns his mouth to her clit.

He feels her body coiling up, nearing the end, but she grabs him by the hair roughly and pulls his face up. He keeps moving his fingers in and out of her but she grasps his arm to still him.

When he’s fully up, over her body, she kisses him where his lips are wet with her. His hands brace either side of her. She uses her hands to yank him by his hair away from her again, and flips them so she straddles his chest, wetting his chest where her legs splay wide. She rolled his boxers down, uncovers his cock where it presses against him at an angry angle, hard and heavy against the lowest part of his torso.

His arms come up to her waist but she pushes them away and presses his wrists into the mattress above his head. He tries to move them but she stills his movements, crosses his wrists together and holds them there grazing her nails there in a threat. He loves her like this. He wants to tell her this is why he has to look elsewhere, because there are nights on the road this—imprisoning him like she’s a super heroine with stores of radioactive power.

She uses her other hand to grab him, give him a few strokes that leave him biting his lip before she angles herself over him and then sits down fully, pulling him into her.

Zayn groans loudly, when he is completely inside, nearly losing it because this is the first time he’s fucked without a condom in a while. Perrie starts to move against him, settling her hips over and over in a devastating rhythm. He’s aware that the noises he’s making are louder than he intends them to be but when she flicks her hips just like that, he can’t help it. He’s sure he sounds like he’s dying, but she’s coaxing him toward death when she’s fucking him lik e this.

He’s coming before he can even process it intellectually, emitting a morse code of groans and short little gasps. She forcefully clamps her hand against his mouth to quiet him, an action as hot as it is painful, but it does little to muffle the sound. He sneaks a hand down where their bodies are connected and tries his best to work her clit even though he knows he’s mostly useless now, body under the control of something different entirely, but it must be good enough because she’s gasping and moaning, fluttery little moans and shaking before long.

She collapses into him and he wraps his arms around her, as best he can manage though they feel like dead weights. This is what’s been missing. This is what no other girl has been able to recreate because she goes from wide-eyed, innocent happiness to quiet, domineering control so smoothly.

They lay there, chests heaving against one another, and he remembers this is the way it felt the first tim e they fucked, Perrie having the upper hand, much like she did when he chased her, tried to get her to give him and this a chance. The girls aside from her fuck him a little self-consciously. They put stock in groupie stories they’ve heard, stories that are barely seasoned with the truth, sprinkled, instead, with wishful fantasies about his sexual prowess. He follows the thread of thoughts as he trails his fingers down her spine and she hums appreciatively into his neck.

And maybe that’s why he keeps coming back to her. Perrie doesn’t lie back, let him take the lead and expect an arching back at his first touch. She still tells him where to put his hands and mouth, how to stroke, how to sound. She sees him as Zayn the lad, not the illusion he maintains under stage lights.

#####

Harry had dismissed the idea of fucking Zayn a few days after he thought of it, convinced the touring schedule was ruining any vaguely good judgment he has. It’s one thing to have a mild passing fantasy about Zayn, another entirely to actually act on it and ruin the tenuous order of everything, just because he’s a little bored by the interminable performances on the road and he has this stupid proclivity for the unavailable.

But then Harry hears them. He can’t help it when his bed’s headboard is propped against the wall they share. He’s meant to lie in bed, scroll through some sites online, maybe catch up with his mom and Gemma over FaceTime, but instead the screen seems distant with the sounds they’re making.

It’s so much worse than when Perrie and Zayn are long distance, and Zayn is trying to make some semblance of a sexual encounter through video chat. It’s louder for one and now there’s the added tactile experience of it because their movements are knocking the bed against the wall, tapping out an erotic beat that Harry feels against his back as he sits messing around on his computer.

He considers knocki ng on wall, give them some sign that he can hear them and they should shut up but he knows Zayn won’t care. He thinks they would have stopped by now, it’s been going on for hours now He’s at the junction of impressed and jealous when he thinks about how long it really has been going on.

He briefly thinks about having a wank, relieving some of the pressure that’s quickly building in his groin but he thinks that would be too pathetic. He’s not even sure he can with Perrie here, ruining any fantasy he could drum up with the reality of the situation. He’ll wait. There’s a show tonight and the opportunities will be more plentiful.

They finally stop for good after a few furious rattles of the bed and two last heaving moans. He glances at the clock, digits alerting him to oncoming call time, and decides to head into the shower. He thinks the cold water should be enough to get him out of this cloud, and right things for the time being.

It barely doe s and before long he’s shooting hot, white streaks into his hand and the shower floor, thinking something has to give.

 

They have a radio show appearance that afternoon before the show to promote the concert and the new single. They load into the van, an hour before the show will start. Harry thinks he’ll slide in next to Zayn, but Zayn chooses a window seat and then Perrie’s in right after him. Harry sits behind them, tries not to leer at Zayn’s hand as it curls around her shoulder or the way she leans her head toward his and starts to talk to him in little half snatches of conversation. It’s the code of a relationship, fragments of an exchange that make sense to the other but to no one outside of it, and it makes Harry a bit more infatuated with Zayn and a little bit more jealous of Perrie.

“Why do you look so bitter?” Louis asks him, loudly, as he settles next to Harry. Everyone turns around to look at Harry and he shifts uncomfortably u nderneath the sudden stares.

“I’m not.”

Louis’ brow creases so that when he nods, it looks like he doesn’t believe Harry.

It’s a tight squeeze but soon they’re all packed in together with Paul, Niall, Zayn and Perrie, on the first bench and Liam pushed up against the door. Paul, another bodyguard and two of their handlers managers take seats next to Louis and Harry on the second bench.

Niall shifts in his seat, making Perrie ask, “You’ve enough room?” She shifts closer to Zayn though there’s nowhere else to go.

“Barely,” Niall admits, grinning at her. Harry sees his hand go to his knee, where he massages it, as some strange emotion passes over his face.

“Here,” Zayn says and he pulls Perrie onto his lap. She happily squeals as he launches her onto him and grasps her with a protective arm.

“How’re you now, mate?” Zayn asks him. He gives Perrie’s waist a playful squeeze that causes her to sque al again.

Niall slides in and looks more comfortable. “Much better.”

Harry’s talking before he even realizes how idiotic he sounds. “Should you really be there? On his lap?”

Perrie looks at him like she’s not really sure what to say, but Louis interrupts before the moment can get too awkward.

“What are bloody talking about, Harry?”

“Like, for safety,” Harry tries to explain, sheepishly. In his head, it almost makes sense—he certainly doesn’t want her to go flying through the windshield if they stop suddenly. But he also doesn’t want her to be that close to Zayn’s dick, where any bumps in the road make her collide with his lap at the right angle. If he’s honest with himself, Harry isn’t sure whether he’s jealous of Perrie’s proximity to Zayn or if he doesn’t want to see any more of their sweet caresses because it only makes him want Zayn more.

Louis’ eyebrows raise but it’s Liam who talks first. “Since when do you care about safety? In the van?”

Liam looks at him like he’s gone mad.

“Yeah,” Louis agrees. “You’ve had girls on your lap in this van a million times over, knuckle deep in snatch, so what’s the issue here?”

A handler tut-tuts disapprovingly at information while Paul laughs like he’s remembering that specific incident. Harry makes a few place-holding “ums” to gather any sort of viable excuse but Louis is already talking again before he can say anything.

“Just hold on to her so Harry doesn’t wet himself over it, yeah?” Louis says to Zayn. “Perrie hold on tight, love, right?”

Zayn wraps his arm around her more as she curls onto his chest and Harry ignores the acidic flares he feels in his chest at it.

“Niall’s here too, he can break my fall if I go this way,” she says. She falls against him dramatically, flailing her arms and legs.

“Yep, gotcha!” Niall says, then scoops he r up and rights her on Zayn’s lap.

“Fabulous, we’re all set, then.” Louis turns his attention to the driver’s seat. “Hey Lonnie, can we be off now?”

Lonnie drawls that he’s about ready to take off and starts the engine.

As the car springs to life, Harry fights at a wave of embarrassment, though he knows that no one will spare a second thought this exchange. If they do, they’ll bring it up again as a strangely funny moment, another oddity for their “Remember when…” repertoire.

“Thanks for looking out, Harry,” Perrie says over her shoulder with a wink. He watches the curtain of her hair slide across her back as she turns her head around, and feels a little bit more terrible at what he is intending to do as soon as her flight back to New York races down the runway.

 

The interview is no more or less boring than any other in all the cities they’ve been in. The same questions are trotted out with the words in slightly different order and the boys answer them with the same stock responses that they could recite in their sleep. This time they’re asked by two morning-show DJs that could pass for twins, if not for the one hundred pound differential between them.

The interview only gets interesting when one of the DJs introduces the next segment.

“You know that whole, ‘Lesbians who look like Justin Bieber’ thing that was around, right?” the bigger of the two asks the other.

“Of course!” the partner answers jovially. “The likenesses are pretty amazing.”

“Well, we decided to put out a call to the Puget sound area for pictures of lesbians that look like One Direction members,” the DJ explains. “We got an amazing response and we need you guys to choose your favorites for each member because these girls and one lucky friend are going to win tickets to tonight’s show.”

The DJs head out to a music break as the boys laugh and voice th eir excitement. An intern is beckoned into the studio. She holds a stack of papers with a face printed on each, five piles for each of the boys.

“How should we do this?” asked the partner, rubbing his hands together conspiratorially. “Each guy picks his favorite doppelganger?”

“That wouldn’t be fair,” Liam speaks up. “Some of the lads might just pick the best looking one and others might pick the funniest. We need a rule.”

The DJ nods, sagely. “Right, right. Well, how about everyone is assigned to another guy. You pick out the best one for your band mate.”

“Seems fair to me,” Harry finds himself agreeing.

The intern walks carefully around the mess of wires and chairs in the studio, distributing a stack to each boy. Zayn holds up the first picture in his pile, showing the boys and starts to laugh. Harry can’t see the picture clearly from where he’s seated, but from the crown of blond hair at the top of the person ’s head, he can tell that Zayn will be choosing Niall’s likeness.

The girl finally makes her way to Harry, smiles shyly as she hands him the last pile. At first, Harry’s thinks he has goteten Louis’ pile but as he slowly goes through it and more black-haired, long-lashed girls smile up at him, he realizes he is in charge of picking Zayn’s winner.

“This girl is full-on Harry,” Liam says after a few minutes of the boys quiet flicking through papers. He holds up a picture of a girl with wide dimples and a fall of curls coming over her forehead. A few laugh at the accuracy of it and Harry takes the photo and holds it next to his face for further comparison. Most of them make sounds of approval, and even Harry agrees that it is a good likeness.

“Ay, ay, ay,” the DJ admonishes, “don’t show everyone yet. We’re going to do a big reveal in a minute.”

“I’ve got pre- and post-shorn Liam, “ Louis says. “Am I to go with the bes t one or the most current one?”

“Whichever you want,” the DJ assures.

Harry turns back to his pile. The lookalikes vaguely resemble Zayn in hair color and general delicateness of features but he finds most of them are barely reminiscent of him. Their gaze is a little too light and bright; their noses are a little too big or too flat. It’s not like the others’ who are represented well enough. Then he comes across the second to last picture and he has to double take.

She has short black hair that’s shaved at the sides and flipped in the front, black studs in her ears, and every bit of the intensity in Zayn’s stare. She isn’t smiling, or even looking straight in the camera’s lens, her eyes focused somewhere beyond the photographer’s aim. She’s rail thin and from what he can see peaking out from the sleeve of her shirt, she has a slew of tattoos on her forearms. She looks like the Zayn he knew a few months ago, in Australia, before he started to favor the ubiquitous stubble and shaggier hair.

“Another few minutes boys,” the partner announces, as the last song in the set starts to play.

Harry puts her picture aside, face down as the other have done and waits for the intern to come around to collect the rejected ones.

When all the pictures are collected the DJ explains to listeners that the band has picked their favorites and again reminds them that the winners will go on to get tickets for the show at the Key Arena. They reveal their choices on three.

Louis bursts out laughing at his chosen by Niall, a girl who hardly shares anything with him.

“Really, mate?”

Niall shrugs. “I reckon she’s the best of the lot.”

They all take a moment to inspect the others’ choices. Everyone stops and stares at Zayn’s.

“Uncanny,” Liam says, like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. The others voice similar awe. Zayn cranes his neck to see, as Harry m oves it just a little closer to his visual field.

He nods by way of approval.

“Maybe we should hire her to be a decoy, or something,” Louis says, taking the picture.

“Yeah, so Zayn can have someone to blame when he gets into a mess,” Liam added.

“’You’ve got it all wrong, I’m not Zayn, I’m his lesbian lookalike,’” Louis says.

“It wasn’t me with that joint. It was my lesbian doppelganger,” Niall adds.

“It wasn’t me in the papers with that girl, it was my lesbian doppelganger,” Harry adds. The others continue to laugh, but it is a little bit strained and forced compared to before.

Zayn laughs the hardest of them all, though his eyes pierce Harry with a gaze that has a hint of menace in it. Harry knows it should trouble him, but it only seems to make him want to wind Zayn up some more if it will make him look at him like that again.

The DJs break up the repartees by saying the names of winners , reading from the names printed on the back of each picture. They ask the winners to call into the claim their prize or another winner will be selected.

As the interview winds down, the DJs do a final plug for the show tonight and the next one the band will have in Vancouver. As they put away the headphones, and push in their chairs to leave, Zayn’s first out the door into the small sitting area where they left Perrie. He has his arm around her, and they’re deep into a hushed conversation that Harry tries to make out. Harry gives up trying after a moment because it’s too hard to hear Perrie’s responses to what he assumes Zayn’s mostly empty reassurances.

Harry thinks of Zayn’s doppelganger and she makes him vaguely excited for the night’s show.

 

After the show, the boys are wired, sweaty and buzzing with their post-performance high. They’re given ten minutes to collect themselves until the winners are ushered in for their short bac kstage visit and pictures. All of the winners are in attendance, with their plus ones, except Louis’ who missed the call back deadline and was disqualified. A different look-a-like shows up in her place looking even less like Louis than the first. Perhaps the most hilarious aspect of it is that she was half a foot taller than Louis that would hardly pass for an older female relation let alone a dead-on twin.

Harry poses for pictures with his doppelganger, a girl named Alice, whose curls are more tightly coiled and whose height is a few inches short of his. Despite the differences, she looks enough like him if one were to squint. She makes a couple of witty remarks about the awkwardness of the situation and Harry laughs hard at her estimations of the show and how she mimics the disarticulated dance moves that he forgets he even performs onstage, when he’s running on nothing but adrenaline.

Zayn’s look-a-like is even more terrifyingly similar to him in real life than in her picture. In real life, they’re roughly the same height and weight. Even Zayn is so caught off guard that he hangs away from her, and the others, until Perrie gives him a gentle nudge.

“It’s like a mirror,” Harry hears Zayn’s doppelganger say to him, as she grins and raises her hand slowly.

Zayn takes the cue and raises his own hand, copies each of the little movements she does, even when she makes a lewd little crotch grab. They chuckle. Perrie looks between both of them, frantically, and asks, “Oh my god, which one’s my boyfriend?”

“I am,” Zayn and his look-a-like say, in unison, prompting more laughter.

There’s an interminable amount of picture-taking of the group before Harry can insinuate himself close enough to her to talk.

“Sorry, Zayn,” he says after a purposeful shuffle in her direction that brings his shoulder colliding with hers.

“Wait a minute,” he says, after a double take. "You’re not Zayn.”

“Mhm, not Zayn. Zosia,” she says.

He can feel his eyes narrow at her name, belying how he hasn’t understood it despite his best efforts.

“Zosia,” she says again, hardly exasperated, like this is a familiar exchange she has when introducing herself. She spells it for him but he barely hears after she says the first letter, in that curious American way with the endless vowel after it, the dropped “d.” “It’s Polish. I’m half.”

She huddles in toward him, before a photographer takes a few last photos, each flash blinding Harry a little bit more.

“What’s the other half,” Harry asks her once the pomp and circumstance of the photo ops are done.

“Iranian.”

Harry nods. There’s an charged moment where neither speak, though they both look at one another expectantly.

“What do you do when you’re not looking like Zayn in a girl’s body?” he asks.

“A bunch of things. I DJ, too,” she says, putting one hand to her ear as the other scratches with an imaginary record. “Headed out to spin after this actually.”

“Yeah? Near here?”

She shrugs. “Sorta.”

“What kind of songs are usually in your sets?” he asks.

Zosia tells him and he recognizes almost all of them as songs by bands that Nick has talked about incessantly. He asks her if she plays the remixed version of one track he particularly loves. Though it barely sounds like the original it manages to echo it perfectly at the same time, like Zayn and Zosia, in a way.

Harry can tell his knowledge impresses Zosia because her countenance changes, a bit of her guard falls. Before he realizes it, they ten minutes later and they’re talking about parts of the world they’ve seen and want to see, having left the topic of music a while ago.

“Is she your girlfriend?” Harry asks, at a lull in their conversation. He points to Zosia’s plus on e, who is deep in conversation with Niall. She seems a bit younger than Zosia who Harry would put somewhere around the same age as his London crew—mid-to-late twenties. It makes him like her even more—he likes their cynical wisdom, how their identities are solidifying and refining. It’s such a contrast to his identity that seems mutable from week to week.

Zosia’s wrinkles her nose. “No that’s my half-sister. She entered me in this thing. No offense, but I barely knew who you people were.”

As she tells him, Harry is not surprised it is her sister. Most of the other girls brought along younger relatives who are their actual fans but he pretends to be wounded anyway. “I’m so hurt.”

Zosia looks at him, mockingly annoyed, with a stern glare that’s so reminiscent of Zayn’s angry pout, Harry has to look around the room to remember the real Zayn is on the other side of the room rubbing his hand down the small of Perrie’s back.

The y joke for another few minutes, until handlers and venue escorts start to round up the girls for their exit.

“Hey where’s this place you’re DJing?”

She tells him the name while she starts moving toward her sister. “What, you’re going to come?”

“Maybe,” Harry calls, coyly.

She arches an eyebrow but says nothing. As the girls are corralled, the boys say their final goodbyes, last jokes abound. Harry gives Alice a hug. He goes to Zosia, hugs her too, and whispers, “See you later,” in an ear that beholds a row of studs, halfway up the shell of it.

Louis brings up the Harry’s extended exchange with Zosia, in the van back to the hotel. “I think our young Harold’s found love with the girl Zayn.”

“Yeah, your girl came over to me for entertainment once you got caught up with Zayn’s,” Liam said.

Zayn picks up on the thread, jokes, “Yeah, can’t have me so you’re going after the next best thing?”

Harry looks at him and deadpans, “Something like that,” even though the voice in his head is screaming affirmatives.

“So you’re going after someone who also likes pussy? Harry, this is getting sad.” Louis says.

Everyone loses it, then, except for Louis whose laughter is a little less intense and ends faster than the others’.

“Do I have to be worried about you?” Perrie asks, once she stopped laughing with the rest of them. She bobs her shoulder into his in a teasing little gesture and looks up at him with a dramatically furrowed brow.

Harry doesn’t answer so he turns away and smiles to himself as he looks down at his lap. He isn’t ready for that kind of admission so he lets his reticence tell her that the only people she needs to worry about are the girls along the road with fame-thirsty glints in their eyes, girls that don’t care about anyone’s moral obligation to girlfriends.

 

Harry has Lonnie drive him to the club, bringing along one of the bodyguards who begrudgingly offered to accompany him when the other bodyguards complained of exhaustion. The city is one hill and valley after another, and Harry almost feels like he’s on a rollercoaster as the van whizzes through the city streets.

Harry can tell it’s not the venue that Lonnie thought he would be dropping him off at, by the way Lonnie says, “Here?”

“Yep.”

Harry isn’t sure of it himself but it won’t stop him from doing what he always he does—show up and hope for the best.

From the outside it looks a hole in the wall bar with a simple awning declaring its name. It looks even less inviting from the service delivery entrance that Harry has to use. A bodyguard accompanies him through the door, his imposing presence shadowing Harry’s. He lets Harry lead the way, a look halfway between boredom and frowning disapproval on his face.

One of the managers had already called the bar to alert them to his arrival and explain the necessary concessions for his safety. The owner wasn’t pleased at the inconvenience, hardly impressed by an underage boy bander, but he grew more accepting of the idea when the mentions of press for the establishment were made.

Harry can see why once they walk out of the kitchen and into the actual bar. It has all the makings of spot desperately trying to be trendy and cool that is ultimately trying too hard. Its décor is a mixture of uptown posh with boho hipster and doesn’t fully commit to either. The most fascinating part of it all is the solitary toilet that sits in the middle of the dance floor. It doesn’t seem to be functional in any way but sits as a triumphant artifact presiding over all chaotic dancing.

It’s nearly twelve-thirty in the morning and the patrons are deep into their cups of beer and liquor, woozy at the edges. He doesn’t expect too many people to recognize him and he’s right, h ardly anyone even registers his presence. They are too caught up in their conversations and mild, mindless dancing to care who walks through the door. The low lights and brief flashes from the strobe lights help him keep his cover as well.

He finds her easily enough. There is an elevated portion of the dance floor with a podium set up and he sees her over her Macbook, headphones propped on her head over both ears. She sways with the beat of the music as she stares at it and moves her fingers over the trackpad. The terrible lighting does not do anything to diminish the resemblance; it might be even be stronger than it was earlier.

He moves through the crowd, bumping into people who are too busy dancing to care about the jostle and others who are too drunk and arrhythmic to mind the collision and turn it into another bouncing movement. The heat from the dancing and the poor ventilation make Harry regret the decision to don a beanie and he can feel his t-shirt sta rting to stick to the perspiration gathering on his back.

He is nearly to Zosia, when he sees a girl with long hair come up behind her and wrap her arms around her. Zosia turns her head, grins and then spins around to push a kiss onto the girl’s lips. Harry has to breathe deeply to ground himself at the spiked intensity of everything he feels. It’s so predictable now.

The girl bounces off the podium and to the back of the room toward the bar while Harry continues to make his way to Zosia. A beam of light illuminates his face in the darkness, momentarily, and he raises his hand. Zosia sees him, smiles and beckons him over. When he gets close to the podium she leans into a guy in black-framed glasses, switches places with him so that she is on the dance floor while the other takes over the DJ duties.

Zosia gives him an incredulous look that reminds him so much of Zayn’s stupid surprised face, Harry feels another surge of desire for her.

“I’ m shocked! You made it!” she screams over the thumping bass of a remixed Destiny’s Child song.

Harry nods and yells back, “Yeah, I did!”

“You missed my set!”

He must look confused because she says something, but he can’t hear it over the music. He thinks, briefly, that maybe all the screaming girls he hears night after night are finally catching up with him, ruining his hearing.

Harry leans closer and her lips graze his ear as she ties to tell him again. He still can’t make out what she says so she gestures drinking with her right hand.

He nods though he knows he will have to be stealthy about it, given the laws in the US, and the owner’s insistence that he would sue if it got out that Harry was drinking on the premises.

The bartender is the same girl who kissed Zosia and she kisses her again over the bar before she’s scrambling down the bar, to attend to other patrons’ orders. She orders the same thing for both of them, something with gin and maybe a hint of pineapple juice, from what Harry can tell when he tastes it. It’s good, and he wants to down more of it quickly but he keeps it low to his body, holding it against his thigh, so he can take surreptitious sips.

Out of the corner of his eye he can see his bodyguard taking a phone out of a girl’s hand and erasing a picture she snapped of Harry. She pouts when she gets back her phone. Harry wants to stop and offer to take a picture with her, but he’s too interested in Zosia right now to be kind. The two of them stand together, smiling at one another and taking a few sips, before she inclines her head toward the kitchen.

The stark fluorescent light stings Harry’s eyes as they wander inside of the kitchen. It’s quieter in the kitchen but not by much. Men are running around with dishes and there is a torrent of quick fire Spanish being spoken as food hits the large grill and sizzles.

“I’m on kitchen dut y, now. That’s what I was trying to tell you out there,” Zosia says as she strips her button down to a white tank top. She’s not wearing a bra and he can make out her beige nipples through the fabric.

She downs the rest of her drink and tosses the plastic cup in a nearby trashcan. Then she’s grabbing a plate and scooping food on to it before

“I thought you deejayed,” Harry says, as he watches her cull items from the area to cook.

“I do,” she says, “among other things. I help out in the kitchen when it gets a little hectic, like now.”

She gestures at a row of guest check tickets hanging from the serving window.

“You wanna help?” she asks, and he knows she means it cheekily but he nods.

“Yeah, why not?” He follows her lead, downs his drink and bins it before grabbing one of the square plates. “What do I do?”

“Just watch Ramon for a little while and copy what he does. Most people order those sliders he makes.”

She points out Ramon, a stocky man with a bushy mustache who loads up a plate with tiny little hamburgers before he drizzles some sauce over them, flips the top halves of the buns onto them, and sends them to the serving window. He does the same thing for the next plate but adds chopped bits of vegetables as artistically as he can to the tops of the patties.

Overall, it’s not complicated food, just a few standard bar hors d’oeuvres as eclectic as the décor. With everything chopped and gathered in the mise en place, Harry spends most of the time scooping things out on to plates and assembling things on top of the sliders that Ramon hands him with a semblance bit of artistry.

The bartender from earlier comes by holding a tray of shots that Zosia and the other cooks proceed to take, proclaiming, “Salud!” before they return to their stations. Harry follows along, loving the camaraderie that each round of shots gives them. They keep at i t for half an hour, breezing through plate after plate of food, and Harry even notices that he’s bopping along to the song that one of the other cooks starts singing in Spanish. Even Harry’s bodyguard seems a moment away from cracking a smile. The atmosphere is lightens with each downed shot and it reminds Harry why he goes on these adventures in the first place.

After the orders finally dry up, and after a last round of shots preceded by the loudest, cheeriest “Salud!” yet, Zosia points to the service delivery exit.

“I need a smoke. You coming?”

“Yeah,” Harry says and he shows his bodyguard where they’ll be. “I’ll just be out here,” he says, code for “give me some space.”

The bodyguard nods but stays in the doorway, ready to pounce if anything arises.

They end up in the alley behind the bar, next to an old dumpster, the stench of it ripe with rotted out vegetables from nights before, heated over with the sunligh t from the last few days. Harry makes a face at the smell but he is already feeling the effects of the shots. It’s a nice, lazy buzz that makes his movements sluggish and languid.

“So the bartender’s your girlfriend?” he asks, because the confirmation of it will make him want to press this fucked up situation even further.

“Yeah,” Zosia tells him. She digs into her pants for a carton of cigarettes and a lighter. Harry wants to tell her to put it away because he knows he’ll be done for if she lights it and looks up at him like Zayn would, half scowling until he takes that first drag. She does it anyway and when her lips curl around the cigarette, he’s imagining Zayn’s lips looking so similar to hers curling around his cock and he feels himself getting hard almost instantly.

“You don’t have another show to be running off to?” she asks him. “You have time to be cooking in bars with strangers?”

“We don’t leave until tomor row morning. It’s just up in Vancouver,” he explains. “And you’re not a stranger. You’re practically my band mate.”

He asks her about her set, if she’s played any of the songs she mentioned to him earlier. She tells him she has, how the dance floor lost it when she unveiled a mix of two songs she had talked about earlier, how the beat of one song made her feel so good she could have come. She’s crudely joking but Harry’s trying to think of things like funerals and sick kids to keep him from begging her to fuck him behind this dumpster.

Somehow the conversation segues into girlfriend talk again. Zosia mentions that they live together and Harry feels a little sloppier. He can’t tell if it’s because the shots are hitting him even harder or if it’s because all this talk of her girlfriend is getting to him. She comes to stand against the back of the building in the middle of it all, next to where he slouches against it.

“She’s got tr ust issues,” she says, seemingly out of nowhere. “I haven’t really helped her with those. But it’s probably nothing like what you have to go through.”

He nods but stops short. “I don’t have anyone who needs to trust me.”

“Oh yeah?” she asks. “No boyfriend?”

Harry thinks its funny that she immediately assumes that he’s gay, though it’s a refreshing kind of judgment unlike the straight until proven otherwise song-and-dance that he is used to.

“Yeah? Not even that guy I look like? Zayn?”

Harry can swear he feels his heart stop for the briefest of seconds.

“You acted a bit weird around him through the show, unless, that’s like your thing. And you talked to me the whole time after the show when you weren’t staring at him. And now you’re here, with me. Don’t even try to tell me nothing’s going on with you two.”

Harry doesn’t mind when close friends see right through him like he’s nothing m ore than transparency paper, but when near-strangers do it, he’s unsettled.

He’s quiet, feeling as though sobriety is the one thing necessary for an acceptable answer and he’s nowhere near that.

Zosia fumbles with her phone as she goes to check it making him realize he’s not the only one who is feeling the effects of the alcohol. The light illuminates the bridge of her nose and mouth with its ghostly glow. It hits him again how much she looks like Zayn, he sees where a healthy amount of stubble would make them look the same now and he’s miserably horny and it’s getting too intense.

“We should go help ‘em clean up. We’re closing soon,” she tells him.

“Time is it?”

“1:55,” she says.

He nods and she shoves off the building. She crosses by him but Harry grabs her and stumbles her back into the wall, kissing her as they collide with it and each other. She kisses him back immediately, thrusting her tongue into his mouth and making him wonder which of them needs this more.

“Don’t,” she tells him against his lips, hands pressing back against his shoulders. “You’re adorable, but I’ve got a girlfriend and you have parts I’m really not interested in revisiting, as much as I think you’d look sexy in a dress.”

He pauses to laugh because it’s not the kinkiest thing he’s ever heard that someone wants to do to him, not by a long shot, but she looks mortified. “Did I just say that?” she mumbles.

He smirks because it’s all he can do with all of the blood rushing out of his head. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

Harry stands up right and lets her disentangle herself from him. She straightens the hem of her top where it it got bunched up by Harry’s hands, and manages an awkward laugh. She starts to head back toward the kitchen door and he starts to think of what he has waiting for him at the hotel and he’s immediately frustrated because the re’s nothing. He would have made better headways with a groupie from earlier but he was too caught up in Zosia to plan for later. He hadn’t really planned for any of this.

So when the idea of facing his bedroom alone, with the sounds of Zayn and Perrie making him increasingly more riled up as he searches for any sort of porn to scratch his itch, he grabs her again.

“Please,” he says a little desperately against her mouth that makes a shocked shape as he kisses her again. Zosia’s pliant in his arms again and even if she won’t and can’t be interested in this then maybe he can change it for her, give it something else.

They kiss messily again, too much spit, poorly timed tongue, but it ramps up and before he realizes she’s telling him to kneel in a low voice and he’s opening the top of her jeans and pushing his fingers underneath the fabric of her underwear while she tries to push her pants down to her ankles and angle her legs apart while rock her hips toward his face. He fucks two fingers into her and uses his free hand to yank one pants leg off her foot. Though it tangles, Harry gives it another hard yank and drapes her newly freed leg over one shoulder so he can open her wider. She braces against the wall for balance.

He’s a second away from getting his tongue on her when he hears “It’s totally Harry fucking Styles!”

He turns around and sees two pairs of legs, teetering in high heels. As his eyes follow the legs upward, he sees two girls, each holding a phone pointing at his face.

“Oh shit!” he says under his breath and Zosia scrambles to put her pants back on.

“Oh my fucking god, these pictures are gold!” one of them tells the other.

Harry yells for his bodyguard as the girls start running. Their heels are a liability. They clatter against the pavement and slow them enough for Harry’s bodyguard to catch up with them and take their phones.

In her ha ste to get herself straightened, she pushes Harry away and he falls over in the alley. “I gotta go,” she tells him.

Zosia’s gone back inside in a flash while Harry picks himself up from the ground, feeling drunk and even more terribly wound up. When his bodyguard gets back, he thanks him and they call up Lonnie to come get them. He can’t shake the terror of being so close to having photographic evidence this new, fucked up obsession with Zayn squirrel its way through the Internet, ruining everything.

 

It so late when he gets back that he doesn’t expect them to still be up, knows the only thing Zayn might forgo sex for is sleep. But there they go, the slamming and little broken cries he isn’t sure who is making.

He should turn on the television, try to drown them out but he’s too tired and drunk to keep fighting it, so he stands by their shared wall, ear to it as he opens the front of his jeans, wraps his hand around his painfully ha rd dick.

He wants to make it last because it will be more satisfying and hold off some of the ache he’s been feeling the past few days for longer. He strokes himself slowly, building it as he hears a muffled litany of “yeah”s coming from Zayn’s mouth.

Harry tries to think of Zosia, to trick his brain into thinking this is about her, but her face is so similar to Zayn’s that Harry slips into thinking of him. He closes his eyes and sees Zayn in the elevator that night in Australia, on his knees. Instead of being in front of the girl, Zayn’s in front of Harry, looking up at him with those wet lips and glazed eyes. Harry sees his own hands unfastening the button of his jeans, intending to get himself out like he has just a moment ago. Zayn stays his hands, pulls Harry out himself and gives him a few torturously slow jerks, while his tongue darts across the bottom of his lips.

Harry has to stop jerking himself off and take a shaky breath. He feels the end coming on too soon and he wants to let this play out a while longer in his imagination.

When he returns to the fantasy, Zayn’s lips are wrapped around him and his mouth is so far down around him, Harry feels Zayn’s breath against the hair at the base of his cock. Zayn’s practiced at this, expertly sucking him in and out of his mouth, alternating it with flicks of his tongue that tease the head of Harry’s cock.

At first Perrie’s moans are distracting but his mind starts to filter them out when he hears Zayn’s hitched breathing, like the air is being punched out of him. After that the sounds she makes are a reminder that for now, Zayn is someone else’s, and it brings Harry to the edge. Zayn sounds like he’s close, too, and trying to fight back from the brink.

It gets to be too much to hold back and Harry lets the frenetic rhythm of their fucking, the slam of their headboard against the wall, guide the pace of his hand. His eyes fall shut again and he thinks of Zayn, still on his knees with his head tilted back and mouth open, tongue fat against his bottom lip, and a knowing look in his eye, waiting for Harry to finish off on his face. He imagines the way his cum would streak Zayn’s face, coat his long eyelashes, and drip past his lips into his open mouth.

And just like that Harry’s coming, whimpering as his cum jets out all over his hands. From the sounds of it, Perrie and Zayn are following in suit, Perrie practically caterwauling and Zayn groaning out a moment later.

When a bit of the fog clears, Harry goes into the bathroom for a tissue and cleans himself off. He tries not to feel too sorry for himself, wanking alone after a failed. He won’t allow it because he is going to fuck him. He’s not sure he can go on like this any longer.

 

###

Perrie leaves that morning. After a sweet, lazy fuck on their sides, they shower together, a little slowly and sadly, knowi ng they’ll have to part again. Zayn helps load her belongings into the car that will take her to the airport, while the boys load onto the tour bus. She’s smiling so hard it is nearly a grimace, eyes pooling with sadness at their separation.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you two,” he tells her. “One more show, yeah? Then I’ll come to New York.”

She nods and he kisses her long and deeply like he’s making a vow to hold it together until then. Her hands come up on either side of his face, thumbs slowly

The other boys, walk out of the bus and tentatively approach the two of them.

“We want to say good-bye too,” Liam says.

“Aw, come over!” Perrie says brightly, waving them to her. Niall reaches her first and wraps her up in a bear hug. Then Liam and Louis follow, with hugs, well wishes, “See you soon, love”s. Harry’s last to approach her and he saunters to her with a bouncier step than Zayn’s noticed from him in the last few weeks. He pulls her in close and rocks her side to side in his hug. Harry’s eyes meet Zayn’s over Perrie’s shoulder, with that same strangeness that Zayn noticed when Perrie first got in. He still can’t read its meaning.

Harry kisses her on the cheek and lets her go. Perrie turns back to Zayn and gives him one last, long hug and sweet kiss that has all the finality of a goodbye.

“Be good, yeah?” he tells her as she settles onto the backseat. It’s a stupid, nothing line that he parrots because he’s heard so many people say it as parting words. But it’s an awful line he realizes when she sees her expression turn doleful.

“You too,” she croaks.

“I will,” Zayn says, but as he watches the car drive away he thinks he should have closed the door on her before he could make a promise he hasn’t been able to keep thus far.

 

They’ve only just begun their drive north when the managers call every one to the couches at the back. Zayn wants nothing more than to curl up on his bunk and nap away the travel time and avoid the sad pangs he feels already at Perrie’s departure. Managers insist the meeting is important.

It isn’t exactly unexpected, there were rumors about it before, but it feels like a dropped bomb nonetheless. Their tour manager announces that they have added five more shows to the lineup, pushing the end of this leg back by three weeks. Their six-week break before Adelaide will be cut in half.

“The demand for you all is at a fever pitch and it would be best to do as much now, then wait when things might not be…” The manager cites reasons but Zayn tunes him out, uninterested in the excuses.

Zayn manages to hear the list cities they’ll be playing for the next few weeks. They’re a mixture of geographic points up in the States and Canada that will bring them back to the east coast. He recognizes a few names because they played the points earlier in the summer but can’t remember what they look like. It doesn’t matter; he’ll only be acquainted with their skylines as they drive in, the arenas they’ll perform in, and the insides of the hotel rooms. Even those things are starting to look exactly the same, slight variations on the same urban sprawl.

Though the added shows are daunting, Zayn’s fears go straight to one thing—Perrie and the melancholic downturn of her mouth before she was driven away. He has to do better. These last days with her have resolved him to it now because he can’t bear to wring that expression out of her again. Zayn ignores the inkling in the back of his mind that says he is doomed to fail.

Zayn looks around at the others who wear similar expressions of grave exhaustion at the additional shows. They’re all so tired already, The only one who looks unbothered by the additional shows is Harry who loses himself in his phone after a while but Zayn’s not surprised. It’s different for Harry. The people waiting for him at home are just the self-absorbed cokeheads he surrounds himself with now, ones that talk him into taking the occasional bump at parties, and Nick, who looks at Harry a little bit like he’s lost and in awe. It isn’t unlike how Leigh-Anne looks at Perrie, when Zayn thinks about it.

After the meeting, the boys disperse to their different areas. Louis and Liam flip on a television while Niall fiddles with his guitar on the couch. Zayn heads to the middle of the bus, toward the bunk beds. He craves sleep now, more than ever.

Harry follows behind him. Zayn goes to his bottom bunk and practically collapses into it. He is about to pull the curtain across, but pauses to watch Harry scramble to get onto his bed, the top bunk across the way. He looks like comical octopus like that, limbs splayed out and grabbing for the sides so he won’t fall over. The bus slams into a halt and Harry has to lock his arms and legs around the sides of his bunk to keep from flying.

A moment later they hear Lonnie’s distant, sheepish, “Sorry ‘bout that” from the front.

“You all right there?” Zayn asks with a laugh.

Harry grunts and flops down onto his bed.

“Ready for the rest of the shows?” Harry says once he situates himself on the bed.

“Won’t matter if I’m not, yeah?” he says a little bit more moodily than intended.

“I think I’m a little excited for them. I’m not ready for break yet,” Harry tells him, staring at the ceiling over his bunk.

“Some of us are capable of relationships and want to get back to them.”

It’s awfully nasty to say to him but his chipper attitude about the whole thing makes Zayn want to bring him down a few paces. Harry just looks at him, with a bit of edge in his eyes.

“You think you’re capable of a relationship?” is all Harry says, in a slower pace than usual, and Zayn knows all that the question implies.

He starts to tell Harry off but settles for, “I’m trying to be capable of it.” He’s too tired to be properly upset.

Harry’s face softens.

“I could help,” he tells him.

“Yeah? How?” Zayn asks, monotone as sleep starts draining the liveliness from him.

“Adventures,” he says. “You can’t be with other girls if you’re on an adventure with me.”

“You always get up to the most random shit,” Zayn says. The last word is almost swallowed whole by a bellowing yawn. “Last time we went on adventures was Australia. We were constantly fucking girls then.”

Zayn’s eyelids are too heavy to keep up anymore so he lets them fall shut, though the conversation isn’t over yet.

“We won’t this time. We’ll…” Harry starts, but Zayn misses the explanation because he’s teetering in and out of consciousness. He lets Harry keep talking, and lets his mind wand er. He won’t be awake by the time Harry finally spits out the rest of his sentence.

The last thing Zayn thinks before he falls asleep is that he hopes he’ll make it, physically, emotionally and faithfully, through these next seven shows. Maybe he should rely on Harry to help him. Maybe he will.


	4. Chapter 4

**VANCOUVER**  
The boys have loved Canada because they can party with impunity. The drinking age isn’t as obscenely high as the States, so they don’t have to play hide and seek with their cups at bars, disappear to secluded VIP areas to quickly down a drink, or insist they’re having water to curious inquirers. Only recently has Louis been able to gleefully raise his cup high in America, his status as the eldest finally proving advantageous. The rest of them are left to look on jealously as they hide their drinks behind their backs, like crossed fingers. It’s for the best; Louis was terrible at being covert.

Zayn, on the other hand, is excellent at being furtive about his drinking—perhaps a holdover from stealthily hiding his other vices—so the charade in the States doesn’t exasperate him as much. It only bugs him when a few opportunistic owners try to throw their weight around, cowering behind federal laws until management offers the right compensation, and then treating the boys like ticking time bombs because they haven’t reached an arbitrary age. Returning to Canada, where things seem more like home, is always a relief.

They were planning on celebrating the end of the North American leg at a club close to their waterfront hotel, but now they’ll have to celebrate the end’s new beginning. They’ll drink to help them forget that they’re being wrung out for a little bit more cash. Zayn looks forward to blowing off steam later, craves stinging liquor on his tongue, but first there is tonight’s show to get through.

The band and crew arrive at Roger’s Arena, eight hours before show time, and start the usual preparations. There’s a cheerless, resigned atmosphere during it all. Road crew unloads all the physical components of the show—instruments, microphones, and endless yards of wires—and arranges them in the now routine way that it will appear on stage. As usual, the stage erupts f rom the ground level out of nowhere, large, black, elevated, and decorated with their logo and speakers to broadcast the sound in all directions.

The band has another promotional radio appearance, but the interviewers are coming to them, instead, freeing up Lonnie to help out the crew where he can. He always lends a hand to feel more useful when he doesn’t to drive the boys. Invariably, he overexerts himself and a phlegmy coughing jag has him take a seat, and bow out of helping for the remainder of the day.

Zayn hasn’t moved from his perch, in the third row of seats, through all of it. The others have steered clear of him all day, recognizing his blank face and headphone-adorned ears as signs that he’s in one of his moods. They’ll approach him when he gives them the okay, by looking even slightly engaged at what’s going on around him or returning their attempts at conversation. Until then, he watches them when he’s not petulantly messing around on h is iPad or dozing on and off.

Perrie texts him two hours later to tell him she’s arrived, which only sends him into another pout. It takes him a while to come up with a response, partly because Liam distracts him. Liam has been practicing his falsetto for “Change My Mind” for the last hour. Zayn overheard him dispassionately telling Louis how shaky it sounded in Seattle, on the bus. It still sounds shaky now and it’s drowning out Frank Ocean’s somber crooning in Zayn’s ears. Zayn scowls, turns the volume higher and constructs a message to Perrie that lets her know he misses her, too.

Louis comes over and sits down, keeps a seat in between them. They watch road crew start to fit the pieces of the show’s electrical skeleton together like a puzzle.

“You have to snap out of this soon, mate. I’m not bothering with you like this on stage,” Louis tells him.

Zayn gives no indication that he hears, and continues to drag a finger across the iPad’s screen. He’s doodling, making a picture with strokes and taps of his fingertips on the screen. It’s another cartoonish rendition, of a person. He likes them that way because they are closer to the fantastic, not copies of the planes and slopes of a bone structure that is confined to reality. He’s shading beneath the eyes and adding more whorls of hair when he notices that Louis is gone.

His phone buzzes again. “Misss yooooooooou :( xx” lights up the screen. He stares at it until the light fades and flickers out. As though inspired by his phone, the whole arena goes black, and hushing the crew’s chatter. An array of colored beams shines around sections of the stage and seating, a run-through for the show. The talk resumes, quieter than before, strangely reverent to the dark.

Zayn zones out and follows a dust mote with his eyes as it travels through the air, illuminated in the green, blue, then red light. It falls somewhere below his line of sight, but the trajectory brings his gaze to two profiles, turned to one another, one in set into relief by shaggy curls.

Harry is saying something, marking whatever it is as important by widening his eyes, and Lonnie is laughing when he’s not off on another coughing fit. Harry’s excitement about the most inane things is infectious if Zayn’s in the right headspace for it. If he’s not, it’s obnoxious white noise that he sometimes can’t tune out.

Right now, Zayn is tempted to push one cup of his headphones off his ear and ask them what they’re talking about. He takes this as one sign he’s returning to them, that some of the moodiness is dissipating. The second sign is that the way the lights hit Harry, and make the contours of his face glow in the darkness, has Zayn wanting to draw him, instead of tune him, and everything else out. The boys become his art subjects every so often, based on random chance of lighting and proximity. He looks at th e latest doodle he had started before the lights went out, still in the early stages of creation, not yet defined enough to look like anyone particular. Some finger drags later, he has made a caricature of Harry, with a giant head, massive, wide, doe eyes and plump lips.

The lights turn back on and Harry turns his head to look up at Zayn, who realizes he has been staring. Harry nods at him.

“Hey,” he calls.

“Drew you,” Zayn says, as he holds up the iPad.

Harry squints. “Nice but you got the body wrong. I need a bigger cock on there. Right, Lonnie?”

“F’sure,” Lonnie says, indulging him.

“Yeah, right, yeah,” Zayn says, playing along, too. He proceeds to attach a phallic shape, that takes up the rest of the screen, to the tiny legs he had drawn. “Like this?”

“Maybe a little bigger?” Harry asks.

“I’ve seen it, mate. This is generous.”

Lonnie laughs and says, “He’s gotcha there.”

Harry slits his eyes and he raises his middle finger at Zayn, though he’s smiling.

Zayn’s about to respond with crude pantomime of his own but his phone buzzes again. He glances a “W” on the caller ID, the beginning to the contact name “Wifey,” and feels his heartbeat kick into an irregular rhythm, thump-thump, thump-thump-thumping.

He takes the phone and stands up, so he can walk to somewhere more private, where he can coo softly to her on the phone, where he doesn’t have to hide the eye-crinkling grin her voice alone pulls out of him.

As he moves into the aisle and up the steps, his stomach gives an unsettled clench. It scares him how much she effects him sometimes, how her phone call is already lighting him up, how much of his happiness is wrapped up in her.

“Hey babe,” he says, after he taps to answer the call.  
“Hey there,” Perrie answers.

He squeezes his mouth together as much as he can but his lips betra y him. He’s smiling, genuinely, for the first time that day.

 

###

Harry watches Zayn get up, knowing that it’s Perrie who’s calling. The familiar emotions come to Harry, pain and that horrible lashing of lust. He turns his attention back to Lonnie.

Lonnie might be one of the more interesting people Harry knows. He’s had four different lives in the past forty years, fishing in Louisiana, co-owning a ballet studio with a Korean woman in Florida, and selling crack on the streets of Philadelphia, before he had moved up to New York and reinvented himself as a chauffeur.

Prior to Zayn’s interruption, they had been discussing the time that Lonnie had squashed all three hundred pounds of himself into a black leotard and pink tights and proudly walked strutted about the entire day, to make a little boy at the dance studio feel less ostracized. He was set to leave the studio dressed that way, but a parent threatened to call the police if he didn’t change his clothes.

Whenever Lonnie regales Harry with a story about his time spent in any of his former lives, Harry’s eyes reflect his amazement that this one man has done so many things. They’re kindred souls in this way, never stopping, looking for that extra something out of life. Sometimes Harry hopes that in forty years, he might have a list of life paths as long as Lonnie.

For now, he’s governed by this life. As miraculous as it has been, a wandering part of him is starting to feel stifled.

“That the missus?” Lonnie asks him, thumbing at Zayn. Harry will never get tired of hearing the way his accent turns all the “th”s into softly tapped d’s.

Harry tries to make his face as neutral as he can. “Yeah. I think so.”

“He loves her,” Lonnie says, looking back at the seat Zayn had occupied. “But he’s terrible to her.”

Lonnie shakes his head and Harry doesn’t respond, doesn’t want to seem lik e an interested party in any of this.

“You and Niall got it right. No ties to anyone, no one to hurt.”

“Yeah,” is all Harry says in answer to him.

Harry sees Zayn ten or so rows above them, leisurely moving through the row as he talks on the phone. He proceeds to the next row above, when he gets to the aisle, and continues pacing. His body like he is experiencing carefully contained delight. The top half of his body is tightly coiled restraint but his steps glide. Lonnie follows Harry’s line of sight to Zayn.

“Be careful,” Lonnie warns.

“What?” Harry asks.

“Just tink long and hard ‘bout it before you do anything,” he says, without filling in any of the outline his words have just drawn. But Lonnie countenance is plainspoken even though his words are not.

Harry wants to ask him what he means, play ignorant to figure out how observant Lonnie is, but they’re all signaled to the stage for mic checks and ca mera angle calibration for the jumbo monitors. He wonders how transparent he is to everyone but Zayn as he walks toward the stage.

 

###

The rest of the proceedings are mostly successful. The band spends the half hour preceding hair and makeup, with the local top 40 station interviewers. It’s a platform on which they officially announce the additional shows. They all try to seem overjoyed, using their happiest language, brightest tones, but everyone eventually passes on the responsibility of fielding questions to Harry and Niall. They are excellent at handling the press and feigning excitement when the others are too tired to do so.

A coil of fear hits Zayn before they hit the stage. It’s over as soon as the he hears the sustained shrieking of the audience and the first song’s chords kick in. Performing will always feel right even if everything else feels off.

During the show, they’re wilder than usual, hamming it up for each other a nd for the crowd. Usually, it keeps the shows interesting and works off some of their frustration at the new shows. Zayn clings to everyone like a limpet, whenever they’re within reach. When they’re not, he finds a way to make himself close enough, to stroke a back or a chin like he derives energy from the other boys’ proximity.

Liam and Louis counter with their own friendly petting, and Niall’s playful too, liberal with his hugs when he’s not playing the guitar. It’s all fun with them but Harry’s response is out of control. If Zayn is the mollusk, Harry is the mossy rock. He gives back to Zayn as good as he gets, roping an arm around Zayn’s shoulders for want of something to do with his hands when he’s not holding his microphone with both of them. If Zayn pets his hair, he leans into the palm of his hand. If Zayn grasps his waist from behind and lays his head on Harry’s shoulder when he needs a second to catch his breath. Harry slumps back into th e embrace, into Zayn. They keep rounding back to one another during almost every song.

The magnetism comes to a head during “Rock Me.” Zayn never knows what to do during the verses and he mostly resolves himself to trying not to bop awkwardly while getting the audience to clap along, until he’s able to sing his harmonies in the chorus and miasmas at toward the end. Zayn watches Harry sing the beginning of his verse. The way Harry’s face contorts when he sings always delights Zayn, eyes squeezed tightly and mouth twisted like it pains his soul. The heavy emotional alignment of his face, never matches the lightness of their lyrics. He had to stop himself from laughing the first time they had performed it together.

Zayn hatches a plan that he thinks will make Harry’s facial expression more relevant, just a bit of rough twisting and pinching of Harry’s nipples under the guise of an embrace. Harry opens his eyes to see Zayn walking toward and grins like he is anticipating something. His face changes then, looks less pained, more smirking and devious. Zayn’s smiling, too, wondering if Harry is plotting something of his own, but Louis pulls him up short, ropes Zayn into a bounce and sway that he can barely follow. Harry’s face falls but he recovers instantaneously, back to his performance face, that Zayn questions if it actually happened.

Louis lets Zayn go so he can step forward, sing his bridge, and Zayn turns back to Harry who returns his gaze. There’s something half-said in the look, but before he can determine what it is, Harry’s raising his microphone back to his mouth for the chorus. Zayn quickly raises his, annoyed at himself for getting distracted and coming in late.

He doesn’t let himself get caught up in the slight changes of Harry’s temperament for the rest of the show. He doesn’t want, or need, to know what is behind the changes. Harry’s mood is not his responsibility; he is not the cause of it. He is already responsible for one person’s happiness, and was screwing it up miserably. Two might kill him.

 

The show’s conclusion is bittersweet, ending with a sighed, “Thank you, Vancouver” not the triumphant gratefulness that Zayn had imagined would have marked the beginning of their break.

There aren’t the congratulatory group hugs that they usually can’t stop instigating when they won’t be performing together again for some time. It’s only limp pats on the back and tepid praise.

Backstage the sheen of perspiration from their performance makes their skin glow, and quiet excitement builds at the anticipation of tonight’s festivities. Their next show, in Calgary, is three days from now, so they can spend tonight getting wretchedly, punishingly drunk.

“Ready for tonight?” Harry asks, Zayn as he puts sops up the sweat at his temples with a towel.

“Always,” Zayn says, with less confidence than th e word suggests.

 

Zayn waits until he’s had his first drink in his hotel room to tell Perrie about the extra shows. Her broken, “What?” sends him chugging the second drink he had been holding in his hand, as they spoke.

“I know,” he says.

“When’re you done?”

He looks at his watch, sees the time and realizes it’s a little after one in the morning where she is. The late hour has already tempered her brightness. His next words might snuff it out.

“Three weeks,” he tells her after a pause.

There is no sound on the other end of the phone for such a long time that Zayn thinks she has hung up on him. He is about to check that she’s on the other end, when she whispers, “Okay.”

“Babe, I…”

“When did you find out?” she cuts in, regaining her voice.

“Right after you left.”

She mumbles a brittle, “Bullshit.”

Zayn clenches his drink and his phone more tightly. "Why would I fucking lie to you about that?”

“Why’d you do a lot of the things you do to me?” she retorts.

Like always, she references his infidelity to shut him down. She’s right. She always is. He can’t ever come back with anything else so he is usually quiet and accepts it. Tonight, the alcohol makes him dark and nasty.

“’Cause I like the way your legs twitch when you come,” he tells her.

Perrie doesn’t respond but there’s an audible change in the way she’s breathing.

He’s tempted to keep talking to her like this, if it will affect her, but he chokes it back, softens. “We’ll still get three weeks before New Zealand. I’ll still come see you,” he promises.

“I want more time with you,” she says.

“Me too. I…”

Zayn’s cut off by knocking on his door and Niall calling, “Are you ready yet?”

Zayn pulls the phone from his ear, yells, “Another minute, yeah?”

Perrie's already asking, “What was that?”

“Celebrating the new shows? Trying to forget the new shows? One of those.”

“You’re going out?” It’s meant to be a question but all Zayn hears is a grave declaration.

“Don’t worry,” he says as another set of knocks vibrates his door.

“I’m not. I trust you,” she says. Perrie has said it hundreds times over the course of their relationship but every time she says it, it’s lost a little bit more of its convincingness. Her voice all but trembles over those words, these days.

Zayn wants to tell her something to relax her but the knocking at the door hasn’t ceased.

Zayn goes to his door and yanks it open, asking, “What?”

Harry stands at the door, slouching in a navy blazer, fiddling some of the hair out of his eyes.

“We’re leaving now,” he says. His fingers continue to rake through his hair, perfecting the angle that his curls drape forward.

Zayn n ods and is ready to close the door on him but Harry slides in, pointing at the mirror three paces from the door. Zayn flicks his hand, complying with Harry’s request, and walks toward the window.

“I have to go,” he tells Perrie. Zayn watches Harry realign the hair by his ear and pulls other locks of hair across his forehead. It’s the sleight of hands that Zayn’s seen him do a million times before so he isn’t sure why he’s staring at it like it’s so fascinating this time.

“Have fun,” she says, bringing him back to their conversation. Her tone wishes him everything but.

“I love you.”

“I love you so much,” she says. She yawns.

He hears a faint talking in the background, and only catches the last words that are uttered, “…to bed.”

“Who was that?” he asks, trying to sound mildly curious instead of tense and caustic.

“What? Oh,” she says, when she realizes what he’s talking about. “Leigh-An ne.”

“What’s she doing in your room?” he asks. His mind is jumping to places, fast-forwarding though a series of scenes that would make her presence, so early in the morning, less innocent.

“Sleeping. Trying to sleep. We still have to share rooms. We’re not rich like you lot, yet,” she tells him. A bitter edge slips into her words.

“Oh,” he says, feeling like a prick. He pockets the loops of assumptions he made about their relationship a second ago in the back of his mind; he thinks he might need to use them later, when he’s alone and nearly bursting out of his body with the need to get off.

“Good night, babe,” he says, after she yawns a fluttery little yawn that makes him miss her so much more.

“Night,” she says. She makes a kissing sound. Zayn’s too embarrassed to do the same when Harry is in the room, so he hangs up.

Zayn drains the last bit of the drink he had made for himself from the minibar, somethin g with vodka and Coca-Cola—fuck the sponsorship—and sets the cup on the mahogany dresser. Harry puts finishing touches on his hair.

“Ready?” Harry asks. Zayn wishes he wasn’t in his room so he wouldn’t have to pull himself together into a semblance of conviviality.

Zayn doesn’t tell him he’s upset because Perrie doesn’t trust him tonight, that he doesn’t trust himself either, because there are kilometers of temptation ahead of them and he’s starting to get tipsy from perverting the drink’s suggested proportions. He says nothing, points to the door.

Harry’s onto the thread of his thoughts tonight anyway because he says, “Don’t worry. I’ve got you tonight.”

Zayn knows what he means and he hopes he’s right but Harry’s words don’t stop him from slipping a condom in his pocket as soon as Harry’s turns his back to leave.

 

Niall’s fucked up in under an hour after they’ve arrived at the club. Zay n watches him from a balcony, as he dances to the whomps and throbs of the beat on the dance floor below. Niall has four girls enclosing him in a box, shaking and gyrating as hard as they can for his attention. Zayn’s tipsy enough that he thinks might join him. He remembers himself in time to stay away, doesn’t think he’s quite drunk enough to okay with the fact that his body won’t move the way he wants it to sometimes.

He hears Louis’ loud laugh over the noise in the club, clear like a clarion call. Louis is leaning into Liam’s chest, laughing hysterically, their eyes mirrored images of squinted joy. There’s a group random club-goers around them, hanging onto their every word. They’re not all random when he looks again.

He notices that the girl on Louis’ left is the same one who approached him earlier, her eyelids heavy with the weight of her false lashes. She teased him about his attire, all black, like it was too serious and funereal. He'd looked down at his outfit, then looked at hers, a tight, short black dress. It took him a while to get she was kidding. She put her hand on his forearm and squeezed to underscore she wasn’t serious then her fingers linger down his arm to let him know she’d prefer another kind of tease with him. She almost got him because he imagined her on all fours after a . Zayn told he needed another drink and walked off.

Zayn thinks he might break into Liam and Louis’ conversation, now, but seeing them together like that makes him feel like an outsider, though there’s no reason to feel that way.

Zayn doesn’t see Harry anywhere as he scans his eyes through the balcony. Looking back down at the dance floor, there’s a sudden flash, the resultant of picture-taking and in that flash is Harry, smiling as he leans into a girl. The fans always find Harry, he’s face is unmistakable and his aura is so inviting that he gets asked for pictures most of all of them. Zayn ’s thankful for it, rather than jealous like so many media outlets try to suggest. He doesn’t need to be on all the time when Harry’s around.

He takes another swig of the pint he is holding, doing a final onceover of the dance floor when he sees her. Or rather, he sees her breasts and snaking hips. Her hair whips into her face, obscuring much of it, but its dark, sexy waves leaves a view of her mouth. It’s open and quirks to the side as she ticks and touches herself in time to the beat.

The top of her tits nearly jiggles out of the cups of her corset with every flick of her body. They’re large, gorgeous, real, and he needs to get his mouth on them. His mind does the calculations of movements that it would take to spring one free. He guesses three.

Zayn feels comfortable assuming that she’s the hottest girl in the club. He doesn’t realize he’s walking downstairs, attracted to her like an opposite pole. He’d read about girls like this once , in a book whose name he can’t remember. They were called sirens, beckoning men away from safety. She had to be the 2013 update of the concept.

His plan of attack is simple. Do nothing and do it awkwardly. He was never great at talking to girls and fame hasn’t done much to change that; it’s only lowered the necessity for much talk. He can get away without saying anything at all if they recognize him.

By the time he gets downstairs and circumvents a few groups of people, she isn’t where he last saw her. He cranes his neck and finds that she has taken the place of one of the girls that was dancing around Niall, undulating her hips and flipping her hair next to him.

Zayn can tell Niall’s into her, too. He’s quickly turned his body so that he’s facing her more head-on, as he continues to dance. Zayn watches from the sidelines of the dance floor and finishes his drink. It’s not long before he sees her start swatting at her face and Niall’s in her ear saying something. She nods and he pushes through the crowd toward the bar while she follows. Zayn makes his way over to cut them off on their way to the bar.

Niall face lights up when he sees Zayn, like they haven’t seen each other in years. His cheeks are ruddy from exertion and hair clings to his temples in limp clumps. Zayn returns as much of the excitement that he can muster, though he keeps his eyes trained on the girl. She looks back appreciatively and he senses that she’s subtly straightened her posture to cast her chest into better light.

“We’re getting water. Need any?” Niall shouts over the music.

Zayn shakes his head. Niall shrugs and turns back to the girl and points back toward the bar. He turns away and continues to press through the crowd back to the bar but the girl doesn’t follow. She just looks at Zayn, stationary, and he knows he is halfway in.

“Not going to follow him?” he shouts.

“He’ll come ba ck,” she says, like it’s obvious. “You want to dance?”

She starts to dance again, more slowly this time, with little rolls of her hips and chest that seem to taunt him.

“I can’t,” he tells her, even though his cock doesn’t seem to remember that important fact.

“I’ll make you look good,” she says, her warm breath tickling his ear.

She might be right, the way she grooves to the beat, takes all the attention off of his occasional, poorly timed rolling hips. It’s hard to feel silly when she’s staring him down and doing those little ticking movements that make the muscles in her stomach stand out with sexy hills and valleys that he’d like to come onto. She swings closer and closer to him until she has her arms around his neck and they’re grinding into one another.

Niall finds them again eventually, two glasses of ice water in his hand. When he sees them together, he doesn’t approach. He spins around, causing some of the water to spill out of the cups, takes another route to a different side of the dance floor. Zayn sees him shaking his head before the crowd swallows him up. He feels bad for stealing her away from Niall but she made the first move and he can’t even think anymore with her breasts this close to his hands.

They dance for one more song, heads and bodies inching closer to one another with every beat. She goes in to kiss him but he turns his face away. Her nose squashes into the underside of his cheek. Despite the poor lighting, he sees her face fall and grow steely. He diffuses her embarrassment by leaning in and brushing his lips on her neck. It’s salty with her sweat and sweet, too, with her vanilla-tinged perfume. He licks swirls into her skin with the tip of his tongue and sucks lightly. She arches into him.

When he comes back up for air, she cocks an eyebrow at him and he grabs her hand, leads her off the dance floor and up the stairs to the VIP area. T hey walk by the bodyguards, that Zayn nods to by way of OKing her presence, and by Liam and Louis who are still talking to the group from before. The girl he refused earlier is now attaching herself firmly to Liam.

At the very back there are the bathrooms, painted with drama masks. He opens the door to the men’s room, and pulls her inside. The door hasn’t even closed all the way when she slams him up against a wall and kisses and sucks down his neck. Her right hand grips him through his jeans.

Zayn was wrong; it only took one finger flick to unsheathe a breast, firm and full in his hand. The girl pulls back, lets him get a better view of her chest and enjoy it for a moment. He stares at his hand on her, disbelieving the situation as his thumb glides over her nipple. It happens so quickly that he sets his mouth where his thumb had been, using his tongue to build her nipple into a hard point, lightly teething it as her breath hitches. Her hand keeps his head against her. He does the same to the other breast, replacing his hand that had been playing with it unison with his mouth.

He walks her backwards, lips still on her tits, into the farthest stall. He gets distracted and they bump into a urinal as she unzips his jeans, but he rights their course and they go into the stall. He pulls the door closed behind them, then turns her and lifts her arms up to the top of the door and fits them onto it so she’s gripping the door, with her back arched and ass up.

Her corset has slid down her waist, exposing both of her breasts and Zayn gives them one last open-palmed grope before he’s digging into his pocket for the condom.

As he pushes himself fully inside of her, all he can think is that he had been doing so well, earlier.

 

###

Harry saw Zayn staring at the girl from the balcony. She is the object of everyone’s attention as far as Harry can tell by the way others’ eyes oscillate with ever y shake of her body. Her curves are beautiful, Harry can’t deny it; she’s masterfully filled out in all the right places. She’s incredibly talented at dancing and she realizes it, moving in a way that brings attention to her curves. Her hip glide left as her upper body glides right, flashing a bit of her stomach muscles in the expanse of skin where her corset ends and her low-slung leggings begin.

The stalls in the VIP bathroom have doors that touch the floor and raise high. They were likely made for this sort of thing, Harry thinks as he enters the bathroom. The lighting is a dark red and out of the corner of his eye, Harry sees his reflection looking like he is in a blood-drenched horror film. Harry finds out the stall they’re in by following the growing sounds of fucking. He sees the door hasn’t even been properly closed so he is able to pull it open.

He shouldn’t feel this turned on, seeing Zayn pump into this girl from behind, head bowed as he looks down at himself fucking into her, but Harry is turned on and it’s such a visceral response that he can’t find the words to interrupt. Zayn doesn’t notice Harry’s presence until the girl screams and scrambles away from him. He looks up then, meeting Harry’s eyes with a puzzled, hazy expression until realization dawns on him.

“What the fuck?”

The girl is quickly working her leggings back over her hips with one hand and pulling her top back up with the other. Harry watches her because it keeps him from staring too much at Zayn’s hard cock, now angled in his direction. Mercifully, Zayn seems to realize and reaches a hand over himself to cover it.

“Harry, get the fuck out,” he yells.

The girl leaves, as soon as she’s satisfied that she looks presentable while Zayn calls out to her, “Hey! Hey! Come back!” with his dick still in his hand.

Zayn glowers at Harry and he stares back, not backing down. Zayn pulls the cond om off of himself and ditches it in a corner of the stall behind the toilet. He moves toward Harry and Harry’s scared that Zayn might hit him because his face is so twisted with anger. He takes it as a cue to rile him up even more.

“You that upset? I can wank you right now if you’re desperate,” Harry says. He hopes his smirk keeps the offer sounding like a joke, though it’s more of a plea with Zayn’s dick out like this.

Zayn looks down briefly like he is considering the offer. He keeps walking to the sinks as he does up his pants, uttering a succinct, “Fuck off.”

“You’re such an arsehole,” Zayn says at the sinks.

“I’m the arsehole? The one who’s not sticking my cock in strange trim behind my girlfriend’s back?”

Zayn glares at him in the large mirror over the sinks. The red light casts ominous shadows under his eyes.

“What happened to the adventures or whatever that rubbish was?” Zayn asks him, whil e he rinses his hands.

“Don’t blame me,” Harry says. He waits a moment to speak again, wanting to let that sink in, then switches gears. “The adventures are still happening.”

Zayn dries his hands. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, but we have to leave first.”

“What? Like, leave the club?”

Harry nods.

“And go where?”

“To…the…adventure,” Harry says, slowly, while his mind grasps at straws for plans.

“You haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re talking about, yeah?”

Harry thinks about his transparency to everyone else for fourth time in recent days.

“We can stay here and you can find someone else to fuck and feel bad about it later.” Harry pauses. “Or you can get out of here with me and not ruins things with Perrie for once.”

Zayn doesn’t respond immediately, keeps straightening his clothes and preening at his face and hair in the mirror, instead. Harry is ready to leave him and go talk to that pretty blonde girl he had seen earlier, whose face was so familiar to the other blonde who had triggered this whole fucking thing, when Zayn speaks.

“Let’s go.” Zayn thumbs his bottom lip. “Tell Paul we’re going.”

Harry shakes his head, does his very best smarmy smile and steeples his fingers. “Let’s go alone.”

“And get harassed by paparazzi, fans and random dickheads? No,” Zayn says.

“We’ll sneak out,” Harry says. “It’ll be more fun. Paul is always telling me not to do something.”

“Because you always want to do something fucking stupid.”

“Just trust me. I have an idea, I think,” Harry goes on, ignoring Zayn. His swirling beer-sodden thoughts are falling into a blueprint for tonight.

 

Harry leads Zayn through the bathroom. Zayn is slumped against him, chin falling toward his neck and barely dragging his feet as they stumble out of the bathroom into the lounge. He is

As they approach Liam and Louis, Harry waves a hand. Liam gets up from his seat, leaving Louis to talk to the rest of the group. He moves towards them lazily and has to check his balance once, but his brow is furrowed.

“What’s wrong with him?” Liam asks as soon as he’s close enough to be heard.

“Got sick. I think I’ll take him back,” Harry explains.

Zayn moves his head pathetically, as though he’s recognized his name, before slumping back on Harry’s chest.

“Did the pints or the girl make him sick?” Liam deadpans.

Harry shrugs and lies, “I found him with his head over the toilet. No girl.”

Liam cocks his head to the side like he doesn’t quite believe Harry but doesn’t pursue it.

“Well, we can come back with you now, too,” he says.

“It’s okay, I got him. I’ll just have Lonnie take us back. Don’t worry,” Harry tells him.

Liam looks doubtful, and makes other reass urances that he and Louis wouldn’t be put out. Harry knocks down every excuse, and finally suggests that if they all leave together it would alert paparazzi who might take the opportunity to snap some not-so-flattering pictures of Zayn.

“He’s already had so much aired in the press already,” Harry says. “If we left alone we’d have a chance at being discreet.”

Liam nods, has Harry promise he will let him know if he needs anything. He still looks worried but Louis yells at him to get back over to where he was and his whole face lights up, previous worries forgotten.

Harry continues shouldering Zayn as far as he can to a bodyguard, who dials some numbers and types something onto his phone after Harry has explained the plan. They move three abreast through the VIP lounge, down the steps and through a short passageway that leads to the back entrance. The entire way, Zayn is limp against Harry, shifting like a ragdoll when they accidentally bump int o other clubgoers.

Lonnie is waiting outside and has one of the doors opened to ease the transition into the car. Harry and the bodyguard help Zayn into the backseat that he spills into, limbs in disarray and at noodle angles.

“He okay?” Lonnie asks, amusement angling the corners of his lips upwards.

“Yeah, he had a bit of fun,” Harry says, pushing Zayn’s legs off of the seat as best as he can to make room for himself to sit. “We’re going to go back.”

Lonnie checks to make sure that Zayn and Harry are safely inside, then gets into the driver’s seat. The bodyguard makes strides to enter the car but Harry stops him.

“You don’t have to come. We have Lonnie and we’re going right to the hotel so we’ll be fine.” Harry flashes him off with a wave. The bodyguard gives Harry, the car and Zayn sprawled on the seat a onceover, then gives him the okay. Harry’s relaxes a bit, there’s just one more thing to be done.

Lo nnie drives them wordlessly, letting the soft jazz music he is playing narrate the trip. If Harry remembers right there is a ten-minute car ride ahead of them as long as Lonnie doesn’t take any special detours to get to the hotel.

Harry stares out the window. The city has a low-level buzz that he can still discern, nothing at all like London or New York on a Saturday night but enough that he can feel a bit of excitement. The car turns onto a one-way road. They’ve reached a traffic light that eases into yellow and Harry estimates they are around six or seven blocks away from the club. He looks behind, out the SUV’s rear window. No cars pull up behind them.

He gives Zayn’s leg a smack and on cue, Zayn says, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Oh no,” Harry says. It comes out more dramatically than is warranted and Harry told Zayn he should be the one acting three sheets to the wind, but Zayn swore he would be a better actor. “Lonnie pull o ver!”

Lonnie pulls as close to the curb as possible Zayn opens the door and thrusts his head out, and gags, while Harry moves over in his seat, to pat Zayn’s back. Zayn gags for so long and with such fervor, Harry considers the nomination process for a BAFTA award. Then, Zayn touches his right leg to the ground and steps out of the car, perfectly in control of his movements. Harry scrambles out afterward.

“Sorry Lonnie, we’ll ring for you later!”

Harry slams the door on Lonnie’s balking.

“Run!” Harry yells and he and Zayn are off, dashing off in the opposite direction of the road. Lonnie tries to reverse the car and follow them, but a car comes up behind and shrilly honks for Lonnie to proceed. Over their huffing breaths, and footsteps slapping the pavement, they hear Lonnie yelling at them to get back in the car but they continue racing down the street.

“Turn right! Turn right!” Zayn yells and they run across an intersec tion to the right hand side and continue into an alley. Dumpsters, stained furniture, and trash made mobile by the wind whiz by.

They run for eight more blocks, less explosively than when they got out of the car as they grow tired. They make turns at random, trying to throw off Lonnie’s chase, starting down one alley only to turn left and run down a street and turn off into a different alley. The streets are deserted in this area, closed business unfold in front of them endlessly, so they run with abandon without fear of fans or photographers. Though their running is directionless, Harry figures they’ll be fine as long as they’re going toward water.

Harry’s lungs are burning and he feels a little dizzy by the time they slow down, in front of a closed boutique. They’re breathing heavily but they’re grinning in between choked gasps for air.

“I…can’t….believe…that worked,” Zayn says, a word on each heaving exhale.

“Told you, ” Harry replies, mirroring Zayn’s hiccupped delivery.

Zayn rolls his eyes, though he’s smiling.

“So…what now?”

Harry shrugs. “This girl I was talking to at the club, she said something about a party on a boat.”

“That’s incredibly specific,” Zayn says.

Harry shoots him a look because no matter how many times Zayn is sarcastic with him, it reminds him of the days when there was a little bit more uneasiness between them. It was never fraught with ill intent but In the sillier parts of his mind, he thinks they might have reverted back to that, with Zayn tolerating him because of the circumstances. The thought of it now, is almost too painful.

There’s a mischievous twist to Zayn’s mouth, and Harry is reminded that the tension is a completely different kind now, and he’s the only one who seems to feel it.

“Yeah,” Harry says, “very specific.” Even he admits that the plan made more sense in the dim red lights of the bathroom, when he was a few paces away from sobriety.

“She said it was a big thing to do here, so as long as we go to water, we’ll be fine. Must be tons of them,” he continues.

“There’s water everywhere in this city. This boat could be anywhere,” Zayn says.

Harry knows he’s in a losing battle with good sense, so he pushes a hand through his hair, looks up and down the street. It’s deserted, storefronts shuttered and dark inside save for their illuminated signs, announcing their existence.

“We’ll find it…or something else,” he says.

Zayn takes a breath and opens his mouth to say something, but is interrupted by buzzing and ringing from his phone. He slides a hand into his pocket, retrieves it, and shows it to Harry once he’s glanced at it.

“We’re so fucked when this over,” he says, as Harry reads the caller ID.

It’s their tour manager. Lonnie likely alerted him to their flight an d had called in for reinforcement. Zayn lets it ring and ring, each buzzing sound scraping at more of Harry’s confidence about this whole plan. He pulls the phone out of Zayn’s hand and hits the “Dismiss” button.

“We already started this,” he says, handing the phone back to him. “So let’s go.”

He chooses a direction at random, goes in the direction where the streets are darker, less populated, despite his instinct to go where it is well-lit. He figures it’s better to be shrouded in darkness, to prevent them from being seen by anyone who might recognize them and bother them for both innocent and not so innocent reasons. All the while, their phones go off incessantly, when one ring ends, the other’s starts up, a call and response song playing out between the two ignored phones.

They’ve made it one block down in the dark street when they hear a car honking.

Lonnie leans out the open driver’s side window. “Boys get your asses in here!”

Harry shouts, “Run!”

They’re off again, running at random. Harry nearly trips over a curb and gracelessly flails his arms until he’s regained a semblance of balance. Zayn looks over his shoulder, laughing at Harry,

“This is fucking ridiculous, Haz!” Zayn cries.

They barrel through the streets, as Lonnie chases them in the car. He’s nearly cut them off at the end of the street, turning left so that they can only run toward the car so they turn down an alley.

Zayn leads their weaving through the alleys, turning left into another one, then right on another street. They run so long that Harry’s lungs feel like they’re on fire.

They’re a third of the way into an alley when Harry hears a series of short barks and skittering feet.

“Shit,” he says, his mind immediately going to a large dog, about to rip off his limbs. It would be a fitting end to this.

He pulls up short, giving in. As he turns around he sees a tiny dog with two quizzical eyes, looking back at him, lost in so much shaggy, dark brown fur.

“It’s a puppy!” Zayn says, in a treacly voice that Harry scarcely believes he’s produced.

Zayn doubles back the three steps to where Harry stands looking at the dog. It turns his head back and forth between them, curiously.

Harry watches Zayn crouch down and outstretch his hand to the dog. The dog moves toward his hand, taking uninhibited steps, without the aversion that Harry’s used to from animals. Where they sense that he feels a little overwhelmed in their presence, they glom onto Zayn. Harry can’t help it that it takes him more time to warm up to them, and even then it’s a tall order to negotiate his limbs with a squirming animal’s.

Zayn lets the dog sniff his left hand as he pets the dog with his right. It seems to melt into his touch, burrowing his head into Zayn’s palm to get more affection. Harry crouches down feels a strange wave of drunken jealousy of the puppy but he with Zayn.

“He’s so precious,” Zayn goes on, scratching underneath the puppy’s jaw and smoothing his ears.

“Yeah,” Harry says. “Looks like Perrie’s dog.”

It’s almost imperceptible the way Zayn’s hands momentarily cease working through the dog’s fur. He doesn’t let on that the mention of her bothers him. He scrapes through the dog’s fur and continues to coo at it in a way that Harry wants to tease him about, later.

Harry thinks he’s out of the woods but Zayn says, “Yeah. I miss them.”

This was not how this night was supposed to go, running around and reminding Zayn of the person he’s trying to make him forget now.

Harry rises. “The party. We should go,” he says.

Zayn rises and picks the dog up. It gives a yelp but is pliant in Zayn’s hand once he gives it another rub.

“We have to take him with us,” Zayn says, his voi ce slightly less sticky sweet than before.

“You’re joking,” Harry says though he’s smiling at the way the puppy moves into Zayn’s hands, easily, despite himself. “What if he’s someone’s?”

“I don’t see anyone,” Zayn says, looking around the alley.

“But…” Harry starts though he doesn’t finish. He can’t be bothered to argue, not when he only has a blurry blueprint for tonight’s adventure, and Zayn has been so willing to go along with the entire thing. What was one extra, unexpected, companion?

Harry points to the end of the alleyway where it leads toward a huge intersection with more activity and life. Several bars dot the streets on either side and they see people piling into taxis and hurrying off in other directions. It’s noisier here, with its blaring music and snatches of drunken conversation, than the alley was. Harry hears a few screamed, “Hey! Hey!”s distantly.

“Fuck, did someone see us?” Har ry says, referencing the yells that come closer.

Zayn shrugs. “Let’s get out of her.”

Harry sticks his hand out and a yellow taxi pulls in front of him within seconds. He opens the door and dives inside, Zayn follows in suit and shuts the door. The taxi driver is silent and it takes Zayn’s finger prodding into his side to realize he hasn’t told him where to go.

“Oh! Right. Sorry. So we’re supposed to go to this boat near Fake Lake or something?”

The driver shakes his head. “No Fake Fake. No lake. False Creek?”

“Yeah, right, that’s it. Can you get us near there?”

“What part?” the driver, asks in heavily accented English.

“The part with all the boats…?” Harry says. The driver stares at Harry incredulously in the rearview mirror.

Zayn cuts in with, “Can you just get us as close to it as you can?”

The driver says nothing and puts the car into drive, turns the steering wheel to merg e back into the traffic coming down the road.

Zayn is still fixated on the dog as Harry’s head slumps against the window. He sees a flash out of the corner of his eye and realizes Zayn is taking a picture of the dog. He taps the phone a few more times then pockets it. Harry doesn’t need to guess who will be receiving the picture.

It’s a shorter jaunt than Harry anticipates. He feels as though they’ve just sat down by the time the taxi slows and the driver hits the meter to determine their fare. The fee is pocket change and looking around, Harry realizes they’ve only gone a couple blocks away from where they hailed the cab.

They don’t have any cash between them but Harry produces the credit card that management was stupid enough to give each of them for business expenses. Each of the boys had admitted to making a frivolous purchase with it before, insisting that four hundred pounds worth of clothes or a two hundred pound bar tab was a business expenditure.

As the taxi pulls away from them, Zayn sets the dog back down. It pops out of his arms with a yelp and pads around in a circle, shaking itself.

“What now?” Zayn asks looking out a the dozens of boats docked in the water in front of them, lined up in neat rows. They bob and sway in the water, some decorated with strings of lights that make them look like floating Christmas trees.

“Uh, look for the party?” Harry offers.

On their right, a bridge is imposingly suspended across the creek. To the left is a park that seems to be overly lit. Thumping stereo sound with random snippets of dialogue comes from its direction, and when he looks again he realizes there’s some large, rectangular construction blocking off half of the park.

“Looks like a late night cinema,” Harry notes. “But outside?”

Zayn cranes his neck to see more of the park. “ Wonder what movie…”

The dog starts to bark, several yaps and yel ps that grate. Harry is about to ask Zayn what is wrong with it when commotion pulls away his attention.

“Hey! Hey!” someone shouts, as they make their way to the boats. It’s familiar. “That’s the cocksucker that stole my dog!”

It’s then that Harry realizes it’s the same voice from minutes before they had piled into the taxi.

Zayn turns his head at the same time. Three guys are charging at them. From what he can see, they are dressed in all black—tattered hoodies and jeans--with bandanas adorning their necks and wrists. Harry remembers Lonnie referring to them as crust punks, vagrant kids. Their lifestyle didn’t seem terribly unlike the band’s shifting borders. But while the boys made their livelihood in big arenas, these guys made their livelihoods in alleyways and on pavement glittering with fractured glass. But none of it matters now with them bearing down on Zayn and Harry, malicious intent enhancing their pursuit.

“Wha t are you going to do about it?” Harry yells at them.

They don’t respond but Harry sees one of them, raise something large and silvery over his head.

“Was that a machete, mate?” Zayn asks, pointing.

“Run!” Harry yells for the third time that night.

They run harder and faster than they had when Lonnie was following them. Harry runs with even less of a plan this time, their only goal to find somewhere they can hide.

“Cinema!” Zayn calls to him. As they reach the park from their angle, they realize it’s been gated off for the event, forcing them to go around the side to another main entrance. Harry points out where the park curves, how it would lead them right to the crust punk’s path where he assumed they get the shit beat out of them, though perhaps Zayn would be less maimed. Zayn could fight, but Harry thinks he would be less than useless. He can’t help but hope they don’t go for his cock—he always ends up getting h it there these days—hopes that Zayn could fight them off for long enough for Harry to finally answer one of their phone calls and get help.

“Up and over,” Zayn says, interrupting Harry’s doomed daydreams.

He grips part of the gate and uses the parts where the wrought iron curls and swirls in a decorative pattern for footholds. The gate is no more than two or three inches taller than Harry. Zayn is at the top, swinging a leg over to jump down and looks around for Harry.

“Get on with it!” he hisses when he sees Harry still down below. Harry contemplates how the more things change, the more they stay exactly the same, how he’s doing so many of the same things he used to just on a greater stage.

Harry climbs in suit, repeating the trail that Zayn made as closely as he can. His boots slip on the second foothold and his wrists scrapes against the gate. Zayn jumps down and lands handily on his feet. He holds the gate steady on his side, wher e it sways with Harry’s weight.

Harry is finally transitioning his feet over the top, when a park patrol comes over with forbiddances on his lips. Harry flops to the ground, but manages to find his feet, proud that he hasn’t gone over like a bag of bricks.

“You can’t come this way,” the security guard is starting to say but Zayn cuts him off with apologies.

“We’re so sorry! Sorry, we had no idea,” Zayn says as he steers Harry away from the security guard and toward into the main portion of the park.

“Hey! You can’t…” the security guard is saying but the rattling gate cuts into his chastising.

The crust punks are scaling the gate and he turns away from Zayn and Harry to attend to them.

Zayn and Harry race toward the large screen, approaching it from the back.

“They’ll go to the long way,” Harry huffs out. “Stay this way.”

He indicates the area of the park farthest away from the main entra nce. They run up along the sides of the park when they can, play hopscotch through people when they can’t, mumbling contrite phrases. Blankets are spread out with the refuse of picnics. Groups, couples, and a handful of loners scattered among them, watch the screen. Their faces illuminate and darken, every action on the screen reflected in their faces.

Harry races toward a section of the grass all the way in the back that hasn’t been claimed by the edges of other picnic blankets. It’s no more than three feet long and wide. Harry plops down immediately, out of breath. Zayn nearly sits on top of him.

“So what now?” Zayn whispers. He pulls his knees to his chest and puts his head down between “We’re going to for them here? Who the fuck has a machete?”

“You had to take the dog,” Harry says, following Zayn’s lead and shielding his face in his knees.

“Fuck you. You wanted to go on ‘adventures’ without security.”

“If you weren’t balls deep in gash, constantly, we wouldn’t need to do this.”

Zayn is about to reply, with what looks like the most lacerating reply Harry’s ever heard from him, but a person somewhere in front of them turns around, yells, “Shut up assholes!”

Harry worries for a moment, that he doesn’t need to worry about the crust punks because Zayn seemed likely to kill him. He chances looking past Zayn, across to the park’s main entrance and sees the guys making their way through the park, looking at for them.

“Shit, they’re coming,” Harry says under his breath. “Shit.”

Zayn burrows his face closer into his forearm. “This screen is like a fucking spotlight.”

Harry entertains thoughts of machetes when it comes to him. It all clicks into place, how to get out of this situation, how to slake off some of this half-mast lust he’s been carrying since he saw Zayn in the bathroom, pistoning into that girl.

“Kiss me ,” he says.

“What,” Zayn replies.

“It’ll hide our faces.”

Harry says it like it isn’t the maddest thing in the world, to suggest that he kisses his mate to save them from black and blues and angry red cuts.

“I’m not fucking kissing you,” Zayn tells him.

“What’s going to look more obvious? Two lads with their head in their laps or two lads having a go at each other in a cinema?”

“I’m not kissing you,” Zayn repeats more firmly, as he lifts his head.

“Seriously, shut the fuck up assholes!”

Zayn and Harry turn back in unison, see a man on the blanket behind them raise his his hand at them in aggravation.

Harry looks behind Zayn and sees the

“Shit they’re coming,” he says.

“Fuck,” Zayn says, as he pushes his lips onto Harry’s.

It’s close-mouthed at first, Zayn’s lips so tightly squeezed together it’s nearly unpleasant.

“Down,” Harry whis pers against Zayn’s mouth, before he’s pushing him onto his back. Zayn hits the ground harder than intended and their mouths jostle against each other but then Harry is over him, sealing their mouths together and nudging Zayn’s increasingly lax lips apart.

But with each inquisitive dart of Harry’s tongue, Zayn clamps down again. So Harry takes the opposite route, slowing down the kisses, gliding and refitting his lips so that Zayn’s bottom lip is between his, coaxing him with feather-light kisses. Gradually, he feels the tension in Zayn’s jaw slacken, until he feels the scrape of Zayn’s tongue against his, finally, and knows it’s just a matter of time.

He smiles against Zayn’s mouth.

 

###

Zayn didn’t make a conscious decision to kiss Harry. It is just the combination of being drunker and more scared than he lets on, and maybe because he’s still miserably horny. But Harry’s lips are warm and soft, despite just a hint o f dryness at the edges them and all of this is for pretend.

He can’t stand for tongue, though. When he feels Harry’s tongue trying to push past his lips, he blockades his mouth, purses his lips. It’s enough stalling pressure that Harry backs off, but only with his mouth, because Zayn feels Harry say something and push him down against the grass. It prickles his back through his shirt as Harry keeps him there, still lipping at his mouth.

He fits his hands on Harry’s shoulders, ready to push up but Zayn doesn’t find the strength to push him off. He gets the why of it, but the how wasn’t something he’d agreed to. Still, he does nothing when when one of Harry’s arms comes up over his head and frames it, while Harry’s other hand lightly grazes Zayn’s side as it comes upwards.

They kiss for ages, chastely, delicately, and with Harry’s caresses and Zayn lying there, taking it, unsure of what to do with his arms and if Harry’s selling this enough that he can just lay back. Somewhere in the midst of it, Zayn’s mouth falls open and Harry’s tongue insinuates itself there, flicking and mingling with his own. Harry’s phone goes off again, buzzing in his pants and against Zayn’s thigh where his legs touch Harry’s adding the strangest sensation. His phone stops, then it is Zayn’s phone’s turn, and their bodies press together with the back and forth buzzing. They bear down on each other, angling the buzzing to places where it will feel better.

Zayn’s mind goes blank just feeling Harry’s mouth and hands. He responds with his own touch, letting his an arm brace around Harry’s back to hold him in place. The kiss deepens further, until It’s a bizarre continuation of the girl at the club, physical and rutting against Harry’s thigh and—

Zayn rolls Harry off of him, with brute force that he feels sorry about a moment later, then Zayn scrambles away from him until he’s on all fours, trying to make it to two. As he looks back at Harry, he seems a little shell-shocked too, staring at the ground with an unasked question on his creased brow.

Zayn looks around but all he sees are people watching the movie peacefully. There is no sign of the guys that were chasing them anywhere. Zayn goes back to the ground, whispers, “Call Lonnie to get us.”

Harry turns his head to Zayn, looks at him out of the corner of his eye as he nods.

“We should at least finish the movie,” Harry says, with a sad smile. He thumbs at the screen.

“Just call him,” Zayn insists.

He watches the ends of the film while Harry does his best to explain to Lonnie where they are. He realizes it is a slasher flick, it explains the screaming he had been vaguely cognizant of earlier. Zayn has to turn his head when the protagonist’s chest gets sawed into pieces, his heart spurting red everywhere.

 

“Well shit, if ya’ll wanted to go some where, I would taken you!” Lonnie says when they get into the car.

“Sorry,” they mumble.

“You don’t gotta tell me ‘sorry.’ I’m not the one you gotta answer to.”

Zayn’s too tired to say anything. The day is turning blue-gray with the first inkling of dawn. The consequences are sure to be horrible and make him feel like a kid when he’s a crapping adult now but it doesn’t matter because they have a piece of paper he’s signed that allows them to have him by the bollocks.

“Fuck me,” Harry says, as though he’s thinking Zayn’s thoughts.

“I should have just had you…” Zayn says, trailing off to mime a wank, “…in the bathroom.” He rests the base of his skull on the headrest, giving Harry a view of his neck. He swallows.

“I still could,” Harry says, tentatively, letting Zayn determine if it’s still a joke after all that’s transpired.

Zayn twists his head around to get a look at Harry bu t doesn’t open his mouth or give any other response, in either direction. Because he hasn’t said no, because he’s still a little bit woozy from the alcohol and the sleeplessness, Harry slides across the bench so his thighs are touching Zayn’s. Harry nuzzles his neck, then leans into him, fully, and ghosts his lips along one side of his neck.

Zayn can’t prevent the groan that passes his lips as Harry draws his right hand up his legs, toward his—

“We’re here,” Lonnie says, too loudly.

Zayn pulls away from Harry like he’s been shocked and looks out the window. The back entrance of the hotel is just outside the door. He barely noticed the car ride, had hardly remembered they were even in the car, with Lonnie in the front seat. Zayn unclasps his seatbelt and gets out of the car before Harry can make him forget anything else.

 

###

“Remember what I said earlier?” Lonnie asks him. He turns around in his seat.

“ No, I don’t,” Harry says, pouting and lying, as he watches Zayn disappear into the hotel.

“Be careful,” Lonnie says again. “Be so careful.”

The exhaustion and the tongue-lashing he’s sure to face make him petulant even if he knows that Lonnie is looking out for his best interests.

“I didn’t get to this point by being careful,” Harry says.

“And you about to lose it all if you not careful,” Lonnie shoots back.

Harry gets out, slams the door on Lonnie for the second time that night.

 

###

They get chastised for nearly an hour by their managers, how grievous this error was, how they could have gotten into serious trouble and how they’ll be watched like hawks from here on out. It feels like they’re being punished like teenagers, but it’s not about their personal safety, no matter how much it seems to be. Management is only concerned about the safety of their investment.

Zayn tries to listen but the room’s gone tilted, and he’s feeling the inkling of a hangover coming on. Over their tour manager’s haranguing, Zayn tries to work out the math to one kiss, half of a fuck, and an unspoken “yeah, you can, Harry,” add up to a whole infidelity.


	5. Chapter 5

**CALGARY**

“That was a right fucking disaster,” Niall says.

Zayn nods his head. It’s all the agreement he can give with his throat aching this hard.

He shifts his weight on the hospital trolley uncomfortably. Niall sits across from him at on another trolley, fiddling with his phone and swinging his legs over the side. They have been waiting together for the last fifteen minutes, as the doctor finishes assessing Harry.

Zayn looks around the large hospital suite. He supposes it must be nice, all things considered, when used for its intended purpose with one patient in here. There are real flowers set on a table near the panoramic window, and a nice, though generic, still life of a fruit bowl on the wall behind them. It’s as serene and cozy as the sterility will allow.

The room is markedly less calm now, with the five of them, and a slew of managers, handlers and bodyguards crammed in here at the same time. Zayn glances at their managers now, where they pace just outside of the door on their phones, when they’re not consulting with hospital staff.

The hospital had to make quick accommodations for the band, shutting down part of one wing for the boys’ privacy. Managers had insisted upon the accommodations to prevent press leaks and emboldened fans from getting access to the band. Once the security issues had been dealt with, their handlers had demanded the services of only the most senior clinicians currently on call. The hospital liaison that had been dealing with their case sighed deeply but had made the necessary concessions.

Niall turns around to look at the curtain that has been drawn down the middle. It’s supposed to create some semblance of privacy but Zayn finds it amusing. They’re such integral parts of each other’s lives that partitioning seems pointless. They can hear most of what’s happening on the other side anyway, all of the doctor’s questions that fire off like torpedoes and Harry’s answers that slowly lurch out of his mouth.

The curtain shakes and parts, as Liam comes around from the other side. Just before he draws it closed again, Zayn sees doctor examining Harry’s foot.

“How is he?” Niall asks.

“He doesn’t seem to have broken anything so they think he just bruised a bone when he fell,” Liam says. “They’re going to him to X-rays to make sure though.”

“Well, that’s good,” Niall says.

“How are you feeling?” Liam asks, turning to Zayn.

Zayn curls his lips into his teeth and shrugs. He pats his throat, and then thumbs down.

“They’re almost done with him so they’ll be on to you in a minute.”

Zayn’s phone rings and the screen lights up, with a frantic R u ok??????? from Perrie displayed under the time. He had texted her when they had first gotten to the hospital, when he had been feeling frightened, like his world was collapsing on top of him.

He writes back, Yea but my voic isnt :( and sets his phone next to him, face down.

The curtain is drawn back, revealing Harry, in a wheelchair that is being pushed by a nurse. His left leg is extended in front of him, skin-tight jeans rolled up as far as they will go to expose a swath of hair-peppered skin that tapers to his swollen foot. It has turned purple and blue. An ice pack balances on top of it, taped into place. Louis follows behind them.

“You all right, Harry?” Niall asks him.

“Yeah, doesn’t seem too serious,” Harry says, as he is pushed by them, toward the door.

Zayn feels Harry’s eyes on him but he won’t look Harry in the eye. He’ll focus on his neck or his chin or, distressingly, his mouth but he won’t go any further upward. It has been like this since they left Vancouver, when Zayn had woken up in his hotel room and realized that he had nearly let Harry jerk him off in the back of the van with Lonnie a mere arm’s length away. He knew Harry was having a laugh, would have probably groped him once for show, then cackled in his face, but Zayn felt the strangest disappointment when Lonnie had pulled in front of the hotel and curtailed anything from happening. It sent him rushing from the elevator to his bathroom, vomiting up the remnants of that night’s dinner, disintegrating in his stomach acid and raw fear.

“How’s the voice?” Harry asks.

Zayn’s eyes are cast downward, when he raises his hands and shoulders as if to say, “I don’t know.”

“I’m going to follow him,” Louis tells them. “You lads staying here?”

“I should go with you,” Liam says to Harry, and Zayn can tell from the set of his mouth that Liam is winding up for another apology.

The nurse pushing Harry clucks then, admonishing against anymore tag-a-longs.

“Yeah. Stay here,” Harry says, echoing her sentiments.

“I really am sorry. I didn’t realize you’d get hurt,” Liam starts again, for at least the thirtieth time since the incident.

“No, don’t,” Harry calls from the hallway, as Louis says, “Oh fucking hell, Liam, I’m the one who told you to do it.”

Liam shuts up but he frowns, the corners of his mouth downturned, bursting with all the apologies he’s holding back. Louis pats his shoulder, and follows Harry and the nurse down the hall.

The doctor finally walks toward Zayn and exchanges a few Hellos with the boys before heading to a sink to wash his hands. He’s a thin, wiry man, and a fair bit younger than Zayn had thought he would be. He has an earthy calm about him, executing the routine movements of hand washing with such graceful confidence, that Zayn trusts him immediately.

“You’re the one who lost your voice?” the doctor asks, as he dries his hands paper towels.

“Yeah,” Zayn rasps. He has to work hard to produce the word, has to strain the muscles of his neck together, making his throat to ache even more.

“How did this transpire?” the doctor asks. Zayn winces as he starts to speak so the doctor looks over at Niall and Liam. “How about one of you tells me instead?”

“He was singing and sounded fine, the whole night,” Niall says, “but then our microphones got cut. He had to sing a little louder and his voice—“

“It just sounded like it broke.” Liam interjects. “Then it sounded really hoarse backstage.”

The doctor hums and jots a few notes. He moves to Zayn and palpates his neck, prodding around his Adam’s apple, and under his jaw.

“Shake your head if you feel any tenderness,” he says. His fingers are warm but unsettlingly smooth, like he wouldn’t have any fingerprints if Zayn were to check.

Zayn grimaces and nods when the doctor hits a tender area at the juncture of his neck and jaw.

“I’m going to have you open your mouth and hold out ‘ah’ as long as you can for me,” the doctor says.

Zayn does as he’s told. The sound he makes is foreign to him, wavering and harsh. He is able to hold it for only a handful of seconds before his voice quits entirely. The doctor makes him do it again, the second time more pitiful than the first.

“When you do that does it hurt?” the doctor asks.

Zayn nods.

“On a scale of one to ten, one being ‘not very painful’ to ten being ‘extremely painful,’ where would you rank the discomfort?”

Zayn holds up all of the fingers of his left hand and three fingers from his right. The doctor hums again, makes more notes.

They go through a rote series of yes or no questions that Zayn shakes his head through. No, he’s not allergic to any medications, no, he hasn’t recently been sick, no he this hasn’t ever happened before. He grudgingly nods when asked if he’s a smoker.

“How many cigarettes per day?”

If it had been a few days before Vancouver, Zayn would have answered differently, admitting to a conservative two to three cigarettes a day. He had been cutting down to keep up with the demands of tour, to prevent something like this from happening. But since Vancouver, since he can’t stand to be around Harry without the itch to light up, he has been going through a pack a day.

Blowing out that first inhalation settles the confusing tornado of thoughts in his head. They fall like a pile of leaves, an array of dried out, muted colored memories, with that initial surge of nicotine. But all it takes is Harry shooting him a sly smile, and thoughts he doesn’t want to confront go blowing once more, with Zayn shoving his shaking hand into his pockets, grasping at the carton like an inhaler.

Zayn holds up four fingers in answer, and ignores the way Liam’s eyebrow cocks upward at the lie. He likewise scales down the number of alcoholic drinks he consumes a week when the doctor asks.

“I’m going to have a colleague bring a strobe in here. It’ll help me see your vocal chords and find out what exactly is going on in your larynx,” the doctor explains.

Zayn keeps nodding his head at everything, yep, sure, okay, fine…just fix this. His phone goes off again, with another text from Perrie.

Wat happened babe???!?!

Zayn’s fingers hover over the keyboard. He can’t fit everything into a text, and doesn’t even know how to go about explaining it to her in the first place. It feels surreal.

The entire show had been a debacle. The first setback was that they had arrived at the Saddledome with less time to prepare than anticipated. Heavy rains had slowed traffic on Highway 1 and prevented them from advancing to the city at anything faster than a crawl.

“Going as fast as I can, but you know this weather ain’t safe,” Lonnie insisted, when one of the tour managers went up front to check on their progress toward the arena.

The delay rushed all of the show’s preparations. In the haste to get everything set up, a portion of the stage’s lighting had nearly collapsed on top of Louis. By chance he had popped up from where he was sitting, to grab at a bag of crisps in Niall’s hands, and stepped out of the way just in time.

“Clearly, I’m invincible,” Louis had declared, but Zayn knew that he was shaken up, underneath the cocky tone.

Despite everything, the show had got on reasonably well. They performed in their ragtag way that was second nature now. Zayn sang with perhaps a little less conviction than earlier shows but the enthusiasm of the audience buoyed his spirits. Though it was their first time performing in the city, the audience was no different from others, eating up the normal buffoonery of the show: how Niall bounced and thrust his hips to the beat like compulsion, how Liam compelled the crowd to clap and cheer; how Louis and Liam tackled everyone to the ground until they were rolling about and it was hard to tell the each others’ limbs from their own; how Harry performed in his usual way, singing his verses like he was fighting the devil inside.

Zayn avoided Harry on stage when he could. When he couldn’t, like when Harry came over to tell him something, Zayn ignored his efforts to lean into his ear. He had stared straight ahead, readjusted his earpiece and nodded into space. Harry retaliated by whispering inane bullshit in Zayn’s other ear, stretching his head around to the other side, and subtly moving his chest closer, so Zayn’s lips were nearly grazing the beads of sweat on Harry’s neck. Zayn put his hands on Harry’s abdomen to push him back but there was no power in the movement, and Harry kept telling him something he didn’t hear over the tornado in his head.

Later when he was perched on the stairs, having a rest, Zayn had seen Louis and Liam counting to three. In front them Harry was answering, in his roundabout way, a Twitter question asking him to talk about his clumsiest moments. He had been in the middle of telling a too-long story, a charade with his hands, to illustrate an answer that was vaguely relevant. Zayn, and he suspected the audience as well, had lost the thread of it, ages ago. On three, they charged Harry. Liam went for his legs while Louis was grabbed his shoulders. Harry went down like a sack of potatoes, with a yelp, as Liam straddled him.

“I reckon that is going to rate high on your clumsiest moments ranking,” Niall said. The audience had dissolved into rhapsodic shrieks, loving it all, but the minute Louis and Liam got off of him, Harry stayed crunched into a ball, expression pained and grasping his foot. He hit the floor with a fisted hand.

Liam and Louis bantered with one another, trading boastful “must have really gotten him then,”s and bossy “On to your feet now”s. As Harry continued to lie on the ground their light tones grew concerned.

“Haz, you can get up now,” Louis said, little trace of humor in his words.

After Harry had rolled to his back and tentatively flexed his foot, Niall finally extended a hand to help him up. He grimaced as he got back onto his feet.

“Think he’s okay,” Niall reassured the audience that had gone uneasily quiet.

Harry put a hand up, said, “Yeah. Fine.” He grinned to rapturous applause and screaming. Zayn wondered just how fine he was, with his left foot popped up, the toe of his shoe grazing the floor. Harry soldiered on through the remainder of the set, hobbling to their marks when needed, and standing in the same place whenever possible. He brushed off Liam’s help, and inquiries from handlers and security that stood just below the stage.

Then sound trouble started to plague them. Each boy, in turn, dealt with feedback or a microphone that silenced seconds out of his verse. Liam and Zayn worked over time to sing the others’ parts when microphones went in and out. Zayn’s completely cut out halfway through his verse of “Kiss You,” forcing Liam to pick up the slack.

Harry’s wisecracks about his foot fit in with the jokes they all made about the sound issues, to make up for the shit performance. “Live While We’re Young” went off without a hitch, and Zayn though the sound engineers had finally fixed the problem but “What Makes You Beautiful” was a complete mess. Their in-ears gave horrible feedback and no one could hear themselves. Microphones took turns malfunctioning, the sound skipping out of each boy’s microphone like a game of musical chairs.

Zayn fought back the overwhelming desire to chuck his microphone into the audience, watch it sail and land somewhere in the sea of girls. He did his best to keep the show going, singing louder though he knew it wouldn’t compensate.

He was practically scream-singing the lyrics when his voice went harsh. It was sudden, his throat seizing, then making every sound he uttered jagged at the edges. He carried on as best he could, rubbing his neck and miming the words when the pain got too severe, until they were finally able to depart the stage.

Backstage, managers fussed over Harry, settling him onto a chair with the EMT team that had been called in. Harry’s foot had gotten so swollen that it was hard for them to get his shoe off to examine it. Zayn kept to himself, pacing and swallowing huge gulps of water, while he made trial sounds with his voice. Nothing sounded right. Liam approached him later, once he had apologized to Harry yet again.

“My voice,” Zayn croaked, without preamble.

“Shit,” Liam said, wide-eyed and worried.

Liam waved over a tour manager and before long, Zayn was being checked out by the same EMTs that had concluded Harry should have imaging done to make sure nothing was structurally altered. They suggested the same for Zayn.

Lonnie took Harry, Zayn, two bodyguards and two handlers in a van to the local emergency room. The rest of the boys and crew stayed behind to dissemble the show. Their handlers were tight-mouthed about the circumstances, already on the phone with the hospital to coordinate security.

Harry sat next to Zayn holding ice to his foot and whistling, a tune that was too upbeat for Zayn’s mood. He tried to distract himself by counting the highway lines, thinking of all the ways his voice might be permanently fucked.

Zayn was feeling pessimistic then and he isn’t feeling much more assured now. The pain is even sharper than before, like he has a thousand pins pricking his throat.

Minutes go by like years until the strobe is finally brought in. As the doctor and a technician prep it and explain protocol, Zayn barely listens as he enumerates the hours that are left on this tour.

 

###

Liam snorts. “Oh wow, all right, is it supposed to look like…”

“Pussy?” Louis helpfully supplies.

Everyone snickers, and Harry rustles up a laugh even though it’s a bit late. While everyone’s head is turned to the monitor, where Zayn’s vocal chords are on display, vibrating abysmally, Harry watches Zayn. His mouth is thrown wide and he grips his tongue in the piece of cloth a nurse had given him, as the doctor holds a long, thin metal rod that extends into his throat. The monitor shows his vocal chords looking far too reminiscent of the apex of a girl’s thighs while his phone keeps going off with messages Harry knows are from Perrie and it is all so weirdly pornographic that Harry pauses to shift in the wheelchair, reminding himself that getting hard right now is not an option.

The doctor ignores the lewd commentary and has Zayn say a series of sounds and words. Zayn obliges even though his voice doesn’t seem to. Harry watches the tendons in Zayn’s neck squeeze together as he follows the doctor’s directives. A few minutes, earlier, Harry had been cleared; no broken bones, just a bruised one. Harry’s relief flags when it appears that Zayn won’t be half as lucky.

The doctor retracts the strobe and Zayn closes his mouth, to Harry’s simultaneous relief and dismay. Buttons on the computer monitor are clicked and the vocal cord movement is replayed to Zayn.

The doctor uses a penlight to point to the right side of Zayn’s throat, where one cord moves slower than the other, red-speckled. “Well, I can tell you now, you’ve suffered a vocal hemangioma,” he says, “which is a scientific term to say that you’ve done to your voice what your band mate did here, to his foot. It’s bruised and swollen.”

Zayn looks stricken, and Harry feels an empathetic wave of panic because it all sounds so ominous.

Their tour manager immediately launches into questions about prognosis and treatment. Though it isn’t permanent and he should make a full recovery, Zayn will have to be on complete vocal rest for the next few days to reduce the swelling.

“The next show is in three days and we can’t cancel it. Can he perform?” the manager asks.

“I can’t advise it,” the doctor says. “For phonotrauma of this nature we usually recommend a week or more.”

“Hmm,” says their manager. Harry can practically see him performing mathematical gymnastics to figure out the money they would lose if they cancelled the next two shows to give Zayn the required rest.

Harry doesn’t always mind how upfront some of the managers are about their avarice; it’s refreshing in a way to be around people who aren’t shy about their monetary ambition, but tonight, with his throbbing foot, he wants a modicum of compassion. He knows he won’t get it. Authentic compassion would require them to see him as a person, not a stack of singing, walking, talking bank notes. Harry exchanges a look with Niall that says he is thinking something similar.

The doctor begins to dole out advice. Harry is to ice his foot and keep off of it as much as possible until the swelling goes down. Zayn should drink half his body weight in water and refrain from yelling, talking, even whispering at all costs.

By the time they walk through the glass sliding doors of a service entrance, they’re in lower spirits. The exhaustion of it even shows in the healthy ones. It’s in the rounded slopes of Liam’s shoulders, in Niall’s flat expression and in the smudges under Louis’ eyes.

“Y’all look worse than when I brought y’all in. What’s going on?” Lonnie says as they approach.

They update him on their statuses, and while he’s excited that Harry hasn’t broken anything, Lonnie solemnly pats Zayn’s back. He and Liam help Harry push out of the wheelchair and limp on to the bus.

They set Harry up on the couches; he won’t be able to climb into his top bunk in this state. Liam helpfully pulls down his pillow and blanket, sets them around Harry like he’s an invalid. Niall donates an extra pillow so Harry can keep his foot elevated and Louis lets Harry rest his head on his lap, strokes his hair like he’s a child. In nice, with all of them fussing over him. Almost all of them.

Zayn goes to his bed, looking dazed. No one stops him. They know he’s gone in one of his moods. Harry wants him out here, wants Zayn to let the others attend to him, so he gestures him over but he doesn’t see

“Where to?” Lonnie asks a handler, once everyone is situated.

“Towards Minneapolis,” the handler bites out. “We’re behind schedule as it is.”

Lonnie says, “You got it,” then pads to the front of the bus. He slinks away so dejectedly that Harry wants to apologize on their handler’s behalf.

Harry thinks it was too much to think that they might cancel the show, or even let the boys stay at a hotel tonight, in real beds. Instead, he tries to content himself by watching Lonnie’s back grows smaller and smaller as he puts a plan together.

 

###

The worst part of it is the irony, Zayn thinks. He has lied about vocal rest to Perrie twice before, when he’d been otherwise engaged with a girl whose name he never learned, just to get her to stop calling. But the one time that he actually has to be on it, all he wants to do is hear her voice and talk to her. He isn’t sure if he would feel the same if there was a pretty distraction but it’s too late and they’re too far into the middle of nowhere for that.

He waits for his laptop’s FaceTime connection to set up, grins when she picks up. He sees her hair first, tied up in a knot at the base of her head with a few pieces falling undone from a red handkerchief that keeps it in place. Then the screen tilts and the planes of her heart-shaped face, emerging from the shadows cast by the low light in her room, come into view.

“Babe,” she says. Her eyes skitter merrily when she sees him.

He waves sadly. It’s hard for him not to feel pathetic having to mime his way through interactions now. Louis came to check up on him a short while before and Zayn spent ten minutes finding different ways to gesture that he wanted to be alone. In retrospect, he realizes Louis understood him the first few times but played dump to spend a little more time with him. He appreciates it now, though he hated it earlier. Perrie’s face is all he wanted to see.

“How are you feeling?” she asks him.

He shrugs and wags his hand to indicate so-so. He is better now, seeing her in a loose T-shirt that juts out a little where her breasts are. She isn’t wearing a bra and it’s exactly what he needs to take his mind off of everything.

“How long ‘til you’re all patched up?” she asks.

Zayn holds up seven fingers.

“Seven days? But what about your shows?”

Zayn says nothing. She doesn’t press it—it’s as a good as an answer.

“Babe, I miss you so much. I wish I was there.”

He mouths, “Me too.”

“Oh! I almost forgot. We made the top 20!” she says. She fists her hands and shakes them. “Finally!”

Zayn claps for her. She preens at his approval, with a coquettish, secret smile.

He is genuinely happy for her. Little Mix’s single had spent over a month in middling hell, bubbling under the top 50 tracks. He figures their time in Seattle must have given them the extra boost.

“So, you know, since you can’t talk I could say anything,” she says after a while. Zayn can see an evil glint pop into her left eye. “And you couldn’t say anything back.”

Zayn tilts his head, knits his brows together.

“Like, babe, I love you and I miss you so much but I’m so glad I don’t have to smell you. Your farts are the worst.”

At Zayn’s dramatically withering look, Perrie starts laughing. His own laughter, that he can barely keep back, makes his lips pucker.

“Oh, I’ve got another one. Do you remember that old comic book you have? The old one with superman or whatever?”

Zayn nods. He knows she’s talking about an old Action Comics issue from the 1930s. There were only a handful of copies in circulation and Zayn had dreamed of having the money to buy it when he was too strapped for cash to entertain purchases beyond necessary essentials. It had been one of the first frivolous purchases he had made with the money from the band. He hadn’t seen it since they first moved in to the house, when he set it aside to frame, but he had figured it was somewhere safe.

“Well Hatchi had a bit of a wee on it,” she admits.

Zayn’s jaw pops open so hard and fast it feels like it unhinges.

Perrie’s reassurances are immediate. “I know. I’m sorry! I hoped you wouldn’t notice. But I found it! A new one for you! It took ages to track down but this bookstore over here had it.”

Zayn’s horror is slightly mitigated though he can’t seem to find the ability to shut his mouth.

“Babe, I swear!” Perrie says, looking worried at Zayn’s reaction. “I have it here. Do you want to see?”

Zayn looks down, eyes wide and shakes his head. When he lifts it, he’s smiling again. She is, too, gummy and wide, and it brightens him up so much he wishes he could bottle moments like these when he gets so caught up in the chase of someone else.

She leans forward to rest her elbow on her chair’s armrest, granting him a nice, though far too chaste, view down the top of her shirt. He holds up his phone to the webcam, and slides his phone unlocked to text her.

R u alone aha ;)

He hears her phone buzz on the other side. She picks it up, gives him a coy smile after she reads it.

“Yeah. But I think Leigh-Anne’ll be back in a bit. They went out clubbing,” Perrie explains.

Zayn considers her, his perfect, pretty, prudent Perrrie, staying in concerned about him, when she could be out. It makes him feel a little awful when he think he might not have done the same, had the positions been reversed. He pushes the thought out of his mind.

Betta b fast then ;) he texts.

“Cheeky on vocal rest, are we?” she scolds. She bites her lip and he knows she wants this too.

He licks his lips and uses a free hand to mime taking off his top.

She mimes back, pointing at both of her ears and Zayn remembers. He rummages under his pillow, pulls out a pair of earbuds and slips them in his ears. She’d never liked an audience to their little sessions, inadvertent or otherwise.

When they’re secure in his ears, he mimes asking her to shed her top again.

“You haven’t earned that yet,” she says as she gives him a faux-stern look. She gets up then, pushing away from the computer and pads somewhere out of the camera’s view. He catches a glimpse of the bottom half of her arse, a small, tight curve leading to her thin legs. She isn’t wearing anything other than that shirt.

He takes the moment to text her, tries not to come off as begging when he writes Take it of plsssss aha ;) Im sick :(

“Door,” she says in explanation, when she returns a second later. She glances down at her the phone.

She sits back down and obliges once he’s given her the most forlorn look he can muster. Her pretty tits stare back at him, soft and firm and all he wants to do is get his hands on them. He thinks at some point it should get less fascinating when she takes her top off but after all this time it still hasn’t. This will never get old. She will never get old.

“Now you,” she says, as she starts to palm her left tit, easing her palm and the edges of her fingers back and forth. She palms the other side bringing them together for greater cleavage, then rubbing them apart.

Zayn almost forgets to follow her lead and rolls his eyes when she says, “Come on, your turn.” He manages to do it, wriggling out of his hoodie and then grabbing the collar of his shirt, pulling it over his head.

Perrie looks appreciative and continues to touch herself. “Wish you were here,” she says again.

Zayn grabs his phone again, sends her Y/ what would you do?

She doesn’t immediately speak, but lifts her hands to her hair and undoes the handkerchief by pulling at one side. It unravels out of her hair, red and gauzy and her hair flows down to her shoulders.

“Maybe use this,” she says as she considers it. She fingers the material then pulls it taut between her hands. “Yeah, I’d use this.”

Zayn raises his hands and lifts and eyebrow to ask how. When he sets his hands back down, his right goes to his palm his dick through his jeans. It’s already rock hard and uncomfortably straining against his jeans.

“To tie your hands like this,” she says answering his unspoken question. She lifts her hands to the cam, and holds her wrists, crossed with the handkerchief tied loosely around her hands to his line of sight. Then she lifts her arms, tits lifting upward with them. The cam cuts off what he can see, only shows up to her elbows and no higher. He waves his hand to tell her to slide back and she does. He closes his eyes to seal the image of her in his mind like this. When he opens them again she has dropped her hands.

“Do you have something…?”

He squints at her, confused, as he unbuttons the top of his jeans and pulls the zipper down to alleviate some of the pressure. He lets his hand wander to the top of his boxer briefs and touches himself lightly over them. He leans back so she can get a view of what he’s doing.

“To tie your hands,” she tells him after she leers at him stroking himself over the fabric for a minute.

He doesn’t immediately register what she says; when he does his mind whips through possibilities. He has a bag tucked under his bunk, though the rest of his things are in the bottom of the bus. He can’t think of anything and then he remembers it.

He pushes the curtain aside, leans his arms over to grab his bag and pulls it onto the bed. After a bit of rummaging he finds it, a navy blue tie he’d had to wear at a show in California. It’s rumpled at the bottom of the bag but it’s perfect. He throws the bag back where it was, shakes the tie in front of the cam to let Perrie know he’s found something.

She’s tweaking her nipples, plucking them into points. Her breathing has gone slightly halting and he stops to watch her. Once, somewhere between Los Angeles and the next Californian city the band had been headed to, she’d nearly brought herself off, touching her tits alone while Zayn watched. He’d nearly come in his pants at the sight. He wonders if he can convince her to do it again.

Perrie breaks into his reverie with a “Yes! Perfect. Tie up your hands.”

He doesn’t waste any time doing it, furling the tie around both wrists as best as he can. It’s hard to get a knot around his wrists with his hands restrained so he puts one end between his teeth and pulls. The knot tightens when she tells him, “Leave that shit in your mouth.”

He smirks with the tie on his lips. Then she leans back and lifts both legs onto the desk so she sees her pussy tilted up at the screen. His cock throbs in response.

“Let me see,” she says to him and he realizes he’s been staring.

He pulls his boxers and the jeans down to the middle of his thighs in one fluid action. His mouth and head follow the direction of his hands until he gets them down, then he puts his hands on his dick, giving himself two cursory strokes. The tie prevents him from getting a very good rhythm going, his wrists knocking into each other as he tries to jerk himself off like normal. He finally has to wrap both hands around his cock and though it slows him down, seeing Perrie’s big eyes turn into slits makes it worth it.

A tiny moan escapes her throat when she reaches one hand to her clit to rub herself. Her other hand, still holding the handkerchief stretches across to cup her breast as she watches him.

He stops his ministrations, and holds his hands up as he points to her. She doesn’t catch onto what he means at first and he has to shake his hands in their restraints a few times before she gets it.

“Ohhhh,” she says.

She takes the handkerchief and ties it around her own wrists. The length of it makes it easier to knot than his tie. The red looks stark against her skin, draws out the pink flush between her legs.

“Better?” she asks, flirtatiously. She tests her knot and touches her clit again. She uses her left hand to spread her folds, the other to stroke right at the center.

He nods, enthusiastically, wide eyed, then drops his hands back to his cock.

“Fuck, I want—“ she begins, speeding up her hand. Zayn’s eyes fall shut for a second as he imagines himself there with her, raising her bound hands above her head and driving himself all the way into her in one go.

“Pez?!” He hears someone shriek. In his haze, he recognizes it as Leigh-Anne.

Perrie snaps upright and haphazardly yanks out of the handkerchief to throw a shielding arm across her chest. Her face is comically screwed up, with one eyebrow nearly climbing on top of the other eyebrow and her lips crossing

“Uh, gotta go. Love you!” she says, a second before the screen goes black.

The end of the tie slips out off of his lips and he yanks his wrists apart so that the knot comes unraveled. He tries not to be upset but he slams his laptop shut, digs the earbuds out of his ears dispassionately. His cigarettes press against his thigh in the most taunting way even though he knows he should abstain. For now. He thinks he’ll finish the wank but he’s so fucking over the night and tired that he hits the light above his bed, lets the darkness and his weariness envelope him.

 

 

Zayn wakes up with his dick still hard because he hears some fumbling outside of his bed. He was sleeping lightly, straddling the line between unconsciousness and consciousness. It quiets down and Zayn turns over, repositions himself to get to sleep again.

The noise starts up as soon as he wriggles into a comfortable position. It’s a heavy thump, followed by two more, then silence.

He pokes his head outside of his privacy curtain. He sees Harry involved in this raucous ballet, illuminated by the small floor lights in the aisle and a lone light from the front of the bus.

Zayn almost says Harry’s name but he remembers his voice rest in time. He snaps his fingers instead.

Harry stops his fumbling, and hops in a half turn to look at Zayn. He is bleary eyed, wearing a tee-shirt and his boxer briefs, hair flattened on one side.

“Wanted to get into bed,” he whispers, when Zayn crinkles his brow and shakes his head. “Back there isn’t that comfortable.”

Zayn points down at Harry’s foot, where it barely touches the ground. He doesn’t know where Harry’s going with his foot this fucked. The sock Harry is wearing does nothing to conceal how swollen it still is. Then Zayn points at Harry’s bunk bed. He shakes his head and mouths “no.”

“I want to be in bed,” Harry whispers. He hops back and arranges his arms to grab the bed and lift himself. He gets his legs a foot off the floor but without the leverage from pushing off his feet, he can’t get any higher and flops back down.

Zayn rolls his eyes. He slides across his bunk, kicks his legs out and stands up. He taps Harry’s shoulder, then points to his bed.

Harry does a slow take from Zayn’s face to the bed and back. Zayn sees an infinitesimal shift in Harry’s face but he ignores it.

“I can’t take your bed,” Harry says.

Zayn thinks a moment then pats his own chest and points to Harry’s bed. Then Zayn points to Harry and his own bed. He thinks it is an easy trade, but if Harry keeps putting up a fight he’ll rescind the offer.

“Fine,” Harry says.

He hops over to the other side but overestimates the distance, which sends him slamming against Zayn. Zayn grabs Harry’s waist as they crash into the side of the bunks. He grunts as he back strikes the post. Below them he hears Louis on the bottom bunk, shifting in his bed.

“Sorry,” Harry whispers against his mouth.

Harry’s breath is a bit sour from sleep but warm, and Zayn shudders at the heat, reminded of the smell of grass and the surround sound death rattles from the victims in the outdoor movie. It breathes new life into his softening cock.

Zayn nearly flings him off. He points to the bed and turns immediately to conceal his hard-on and climb into the bunk. Harry hobbles into the bed, nearly collapses into it. Zayn has the post in hand and is about to hoist himself up to Harry’s bed when Harry’s says, “I feel bad. It’s your bed.”

Zayn ignores him.

“Stay?” Harry goes on. “We can share?”

Zayn realizes he has two choices. He isn’t stupid. The fruits of each choice lie in front of him like wayward paths to ruin. He looks down at the bed, barely bigger than a standard single, and can’t even imagine how they would tetris themselves together to fit.

He exhales then goes back down to his bed, telling himself this is about preferring to sleep in a bed knows the contours of his body. Nothing more.

The fact that Harry pulls himself up and lets Zayn go in first, makes him realize this is a decision he might regret. Harry stumbles in after him. They barely fit even with Zayn pushed as far as he can go against the wall. They shift against each other a couple of times, trying to find the right angle, the right arrangement of limbs for maximum comfort. It ends with Zayn on his side, Harry curved against him. It’s so close that Zayn thinks he won’t ever feel sleep but it happens and soon he’s drifting.

Somewhere in his drifting, Harry slings an arm over his waist. It’s casual realignment that Zayn doesn’t read anything into. He is on the cusp of sleep when Harry’s hand comes to life, slides down the front of his underwear. Had it happened once, Zayn would have ignored it, but Harry’s hand slides up and then down again, adding a little more pressure on the downward touch. But this is full-blown fondling. Harry’s fingers start back up and at the top, his fingers experimentally sliding underneath the band.

Zayn isn’t startled. He knew this was coming but he still sits up, shields his erection with both hands and makes a hoarse sound. He tries to get his voice to grit out an “off,” or a “no,” or if he’s lucky, a “we shouldn’t.” But he make his voice produce the words he should say. He utters another graveled whine.

Harry sits up next to him, their hips clanking against one another’s, puts a finger over Zayn’s mouth and whispers “Shh.” His lips circle around the sound, rosy and full, and Zayn can’t help the way his breath stutters because he imagines that circle around his cock. His stomach flips at the thought.

“Just, let me,” Harry says, slowly. Every word snakes out of his mouth, with lecherous promise.

Zayn blinks, twice, in response.

Harry’s finger moves down Zayn’s lips, lingering before he takes it away completely. Zayn keeps his hand over his dick, clutching himself almost painfully. Harry pulls up at his arms, once.

He pulls his hands away.

Zayn grabs the hem of his boxer briefs and shoves them down. He tilts his hips to get them up and over his arse, slides them down his thighs and knees and paddles his feet to get them completely off. His dick is flushed, hard against him and he stares at Harry, thinking, This what you want?

He expects Harry’s face to fall, or for him to start laughing. But Harry is stone-faced as he gazes down at his hard cock. He looks so serious, that Zayn feels like he’s dying under the inspection so he pushes the back of Harry’s head down and rocks his hips up. He keeps the smirk on his face to keep it in the realm of a joke. Harry pulls away as Zayn expects but there’s not the startled expression he thought he might see. Harry still stares at him seriously.

Harry keeps eye contact as he cups his hand in front of him and spits into it. The saliva slides over his mauve lips, dribbles into his palm. He’s about to touch him but Zayn stays his hands. It isn’t enough. Zayn adds his own spit, trying to look impassive, not overly keen and desperate like he feels.

Harry touches him then, with his wet hand, sliding up and down slowly. Then, he picks up speed, applying genuine pressure, at the top that causes Zayn’s dick to dribble more pre-come. Zayn picks up his hand, ready to steady Harry’s but can’t find the will to do it, so his hand hovers. Harry leans over to kiss him but Zayn ducks his head out of the way. If this is going to happen, there will be none of that.

Zayn thinks Harry is good at this, practiced at least. It’s a little slower than he usually prefers and Harry doesn’t do the same flick at the top that Zayn does when he’s alone with himself, but he doesn’t dare correct Harry’s grasp. That would mean he actively wants this. If he’s passive in this, letting this happen to him, then it certainly can’t mean that he wants Harry to keep jerking him to the edge.

He turns toward the wall, braces his forehead against it so he doesn’t have to look at the hand on his dick that isn’t his, or Perrie’s, or some random bird’s, but Harry’s. He can just feel it. He claws his sheets to prevent his hips from bucking into Harry’s hand.

Harry grabs his head away from the wall, whispers, “Don’t stop yourself…”

It’s all the encouragement Zayn needs to tilt his hips up and down, fucking Harry’s hand as hard as he can. He thinks this isn’t about Perrie or Harry or even himself. This is just about relieving the tension he’s felt this entire night.

Zayn’s breath saws out of his mouth as he feels himself getting close. He thinks tomorrow it will embarrass him how easily he gave in, how much he wanted to get off even if it was with the wrong person. The worst possible person. He’ll wonder if it is true betrayal if it isn’t premeditated, with one of his best friends.

But right now, he fucking needs this.

 

 

###

Harry keeps giving Zayn short, fast tugs until Zayn bats Harry’s hand away and strokes himself a few more times. His body vibrating with how close he is getting.

Zayn stops and changes their positioning, throwing a leg over Harry’s waist, so he straddles him. Harry puts his hands on Zayn’s thighs as Zayn grips Harry’s shirt, twists the hem around his hand, and pulls it up to reveal the hind wings of the butterfly. Harry grunts when Zayn yanks the shirt hard, revealing the entire tattoo. Harry watches Zayn’s hands work his dick, then looks up at his just as Zayn’s jaw falls open on an exhale that is punched out of him.

It’s a second before Zayn’s come hits Harry’s chest, hot and streaking. There aren’t any bulls-eye hits; several come close to the butterfly’s abdomen, but with the angle of Zayn’s dick they paint the upper part of the right wing. An errant splash lands on Harry’s nipple, the heat making it pucker slightly.

Zayn collapses back onto Harry’s thighs, hand wrapped in Harry’s shirt, holding his still twitching dick and stroking out the last bits of come out of himself. Harry’s grateful for the pressure on his cock even if it isn’t enough.

Harry looks back up at Zayn whose chest is still heaving as he stares at the mess he’s made on Harry’s chest. Harry thinks it’s over but Zayn lets go of his cock and leans over Harry’s chest. He licks at the places his come pools, where it makes the outlines of the tattoo look like murky gray shadows where they peek out, and laps it all up. Harry watches as Zayn’s tongue goes white with it and the pressure in his balls gets more painfully acute. Zayn goes for the last bit of come on Harry’s nipple, spends his time getting it all into his mouth. His tongue flicks Harry’s nipple into a pebbled point that has Harry gasping and thrusting his hips against Zayn at desperate, though unbearably unfulfilling angles.

Zayn leans away from Harry’s chest, and before Harry can anticipate his next move, Zayn slams his mouth against his. Harry is caught off guard, his mouth jammed shut, reflexively. Zayn uses the thumb of his free hand to nudge Harry’s jaw apart. When he’s open enough, Harry feels Zayn parts his lips. Slowly, Harry feels the come slide over his tongue, not terribly pleasant-tasting, and diluted with some of Zayn’s spit. Harry takes it all in and tries to use his tongue to share it back between them, but Zayn shakes his head against his mouth, brushing their noses together. He pulls away him and clamps his hand over Harry’s mouth.

Harry stares at Zayn over his hand as he swallows it down. He opens his mouth against Zayn’s hand, so Harry can show him there isn’t a trace left in his mouth.

Zayn gives a curt nod, after half-hearted inspection, then slumps over to the free sliver of space on the bed, still breathing heavily. He disentangles his legs from Harry’s waist while Harry stares at the top bunk, above them where Liam sleeps.

He tries not to get too eager; he tries not to strip himself right there and then and start jerking himself, if Zan’s not willing to return the favor. It’s hard when he’s at the verge and all he needs is a minute of quick strokes.

Harry turns to Zayn who moves his head so they’re both facing each other. Zayn doesn’t look at him so Harry looks at his eyelashes and how they seem to dust his cheekbones. He’s fascinatingly pretty, Harry’s always thought so, but it’s even more so now, limp and languid from an orgasm.

Zayn finally looks up when his breathing has gone back to normal.

“Go,” he mouths.

Harry gapes at him, not quite believing that he’s gotten this far to get thrown out on his dick. But Zayn mouths “go” again. He is about to try to convince Zayn to let him stay but doesn’t push his luck. He’ll put up with it now, even if it makes his balls ache, and because it will give him a next time.

The first thing Harry notices when he limps out of Zayn’s bunk, is that the bus isn’t moving anymore. The second thing he notices is that he is about to collide with a figure walking down the aisle. Harry falls forward, hands looking for anything solid to hold onto and finding what feels like a strong, fleshy arm. Lonnie.

Lonnie looks at him, then back at the Zayn’s bunk. “You toein’ the line, huh?” he says under his breath.

Harry feels the guilty look on his face, despite his best attempts to mask it. He is too busy trying to conceal his erection as much as he can at the moment.

“Watching me?” Harry asks, bitterly.

“No, using the bathroom. But should I be watching you?”

Harry glares.

“You want help back there?” Lonnie says, his tone softening.

What Harry really wants is to be walked to the toilet so he can think of the way Zayn lapped at his chest while he brings himself off but he accepts Lonnie’s help back to the couch.

“You watch if you keep this up,” Lonnie says. Harry says nothing, too annoyed and horny to say anything in his defense.

“I mean it. Ain’t no way this ends well for you.”

“I’m not in love with him,” Harry says, because he’s not. This isn’t about how his heart feels. It’s about how some part of him finds others’ locked up hearts enticing.

“Don’t matter.”

Lonnie makes sure Harry is set to rights, pulls the covers up over him like he’s a child, then shuffles back to the front of the bus.

As the bus groans back to life and pulls away from the shoulder of the road, Harry hears deep exchanges of breath. He ignores it but they keep up, getting faster.

It seems to be going in one of the bunks at the back. Harry assumes it is one of the other boys having a wank but he hears a shaky, “Right there,” followed by a different voice’s “Here?” and a thick, “yeah.” It doesn’t sound like someone is having a solitary wank anymore.

Harry wonders if he’s not the only one who needs to be careful.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I had written part of this months ago and edited the plot slightly in light of recent events. As such, I took some creative liberties with the Zayn/Perrie tattoo event but I've always seen this fic as parallel to canon, not exactly canon. I'm sorry for the epically long chapters too. 
> 
> **TRIGGERS:** Mentions of a past suicide attempt and knife-play. Warning for young-adult-male douchebaggery. 
> 
> If it's not utterly self-indulgent to dedicate a chapter, I would like to dedicate this to pretty much anyone/everyone who pestered me about finishing this fic. ♥ I hope this chapter is even somewhat worth the wait.

**MINNEAPOLIS**

Harry starts dreaming about the tattoo two days before they arrive in Minneapolis. The first night it is a rough outline, with as many erasure marks as there are exacting lines. By the second night, it is a fully formed image: three dimensional, expertly shaded and so real in his mind's eye that it feels like something that has been on his body his whole life, like a corporeal freckle he confronts in the mirror on a daily basis. 

Tattoo ideas usually come to him this quickly, a sudden onset image that won’t leave his mind until he gets it branded on himself a short while later. It is only the placement that eludes him. Every hour it seems to slide around his body, a new stretch of skin making the case for adornment. But more often than not, it rests in the same place--under his armpit, down the length of his side and curving toward his back. By the time the endless highway finally gives way to the city's skyline, Harry can practically feel the ache on his skin, as though his mere preoccupation with it has caused the tattoo to erupt from his marrow. 

Harry fingers trace the area, as he uses his other hand to hold up his shirt on his right side.   

"Here." He pauses and starts again. "Well, it would start here and then..." 

He runs his fingers around his back to indicate where the tattoo's farthest reaches will end, just under his scapula. “It’ll stop here." 

Harry twists his torso so that Niall and Lonnie can get a better view from their perch on the couch and looks over his shoulder to gauge their reaction. Niall is just as unimpressed as he was a moment ago, when Harry had first explained the design, while Lonnie lets out an impassive "huh." 

"And it's going to be a tree?" Niall asks. His eyes remain heavy-lidded and blank, his typical response to something he barely comprehends and has no interest in. 

Harry nods and lets his shirt drop. 

"Huh," Lonnie says, again, though he makes an effort to extricate his brows from each other so his expression looks less critical.     

It's this kind of reaction that sometimes precludes Harry from discussing about his tattoo ideas, choosing to get them done before anyone can offer their opinion instead. He finds it funnier to watch people wrestle with their faces, attempting to produce a look and a string of acknowledging words that isn’t as judgmental as their thoughts. Other times, he just doesn't want to be dissuaded, told his taste is a little strange. He knows that it is offbeat in a way that makes people, fans, the media, look at him crooked and he doesn’t need the reminder that he stands out—especially not from the same lads that are kindred spirits in his new normal. 

But talking tattoos, even if the talk was full of bitten-back, persuading lines for him to rethink his decision, had seemed like the best way to pass the time on the parked bus while their managers were inside of the hotel, getting security parameters set so that the band could properly decamp. Or, at least, it is what he told himself when he slid off of his bunk and started hobbling to the back of the bus. 

If he is being honest, his compulsion to go over and talk to Niall and Lonnie started because he caught himself staring out his window at Zayn leaning against the bus. Zayn had been smoking a cigarette, his head bowed with one foot propped up, contemplating the ground when he wasn’t watching Liam and Louis volley a football. Despite the separation that their positioning created, Zayn outside, Harry folded on his bunk, it was the closest they had been in the last few days. It was certainly the most unadulterated access he had to watch Zayn and wrap his head around all of the everything and nothingness that transpired between them during the days they drove through nowhere to get to Minneapolis.

 

 

 

 

Harry had woken up the morning after on the couch, with Louis’ ass squeezing his cheek into the makeshift pillow he had fashioned from one of the boys’ discarded hoodies. 

“Get off,” he mumbled blearily, though the fabric and Louis’ ass muffled the sound, transforming it into a string of nasal consonants. 

“What?” Louis asked, grinding down against his cheek until Harry was nearly inhaling the couch. “What was that?” 

Harry made another impotent sound, and tried to push him off for good. Though he jostled on top of Harry’s head, he held on easily. 

“I can’t quite make out what you’re saying…” Louis said again. 

Harry used the entire force of his body rolling over as momentum to push Louis off entirely. He looked up at him, blinking the remnants of sleep out of his eye. 

“What were you doing out here?” Louis asked. 

“Knitting.” 

“Did you sleep out here?” Louis asked, ignoring Harry’s reply. 

Harry yawned and nodded. “Yeah, couldn’t get back into my bed with my foot.” He flexed it, both to indicate it and to test it. His foot throbbed even worse than yesterday but he was barely feeling it in the wave of relief that was starting to set in. Louis’ mouth was moving, eyes quizzical but Harry was thinking about how this thing with Zayn was over now, even if it had been less personally satisfying than he had expected. 

That initial contact always made his desire flag, his interest waning because the anticipation fueled the obsession almost as much as the actual lust. It would keep depleting itself, like his lust had a finite amount before it vanished completely. With it out of the way, he could be free now, just like he had been freed after the initial plunge with all of the others.  

“Well…?” Louis asked, interrupting his stream of thoughts. 

“What?”

Louis rolled his eyes and repeated himself. “You were here all night? On the couch? You didn’t go to your bed at all last night?” 

“Yeah, I told you. Why?” Harry asked, holding his breath after the last word. He kept his voice as level as he could, waiting for Louis to make the move, to see if he would confront him. 

But Louis looked him up and down, a little unsure. “Just wondering.” 

He flopped down next to Harry and looked for the remote to the TV, and made no other conversation about it. Harry thought he was safe then, but reminded himself to think over Louis’ anxious evasion as a clue to the voices from last night. 

Harry had proceeded through the day like normal, with the usual boredom-fighting strategies he employed on long stretches on the bus. He discussed the merits of John Mayer’s newest single with Liam, after they heard it on the radio station that Lonnie had turned on, and drummed his hands along to Niall’s lazy strumming when the notion came to him. He felt like things were getting back to normal, finally, his thoughts no longer consumed with ways to get closer to Zayn, ways to get himself under, on top of—inside of—him. 

And when Zayn had emerged from his bunk, the last one to do so as always, Harry hadn't felt the overwhelming urge he'd felt before. He had just Zayn again, Harry’s sleep-rumpled friend and band mate, nothing more.  

Harry had waved but his greeting was unreturned, garnering a glacial look instead. 

"Was the beauty's sleep interrupted?" Louis had remarked, uniquely in tune with Zayn’s descents into storminess. 

Zayn had nastily thrown up a middle finger at him and made off with a bit of food before slinking back off to his bunk. Louis spent the rest of the day going back and forth from Zayn’s bunk, making failed attempts to bring him out. 

“I can’t tell if he’s still pissed off or if it’s the vocal rest,” Louis had admitted, after the fifth attempt proved just as unsuccessful as the first four. The sun was beginning its descent into the horizon, casting late evening shadows into portions of the bus’ living quarters. 

“Likely a little of both, I’d say,” Liam told him, looking up from his computer briefly ceasing the rapid call and response typing of an instant messaging chat with a friend back home. 

“Yeah, he’ll be fine,” Harry had said. He was full of the confident reassurance that his flagging desire had given him. “Give him another day when his voice gets a little better. He’ll be fine.” 

The others agreed to varying degrees and Harry sat back against the couch, even more pleased with himself, and with the way things were turning out. 

By the time he tired himself out enough to go to bed, exhausted from his abbreviated sleep, he was walking on air, rejuvenated, because he had found the antidote to whatever feelings that had persuaded him to pursue Zayn with this manic fervor. It hadn’t been the most satisfying ending for him but he had gotten what he had set out to do—he had made Zayn tremble a little bit from his touch, while his heart was in someone else’s hands. 

Once sleep’s first inklings began to weigh his eyelids, later that night, he decided to try getting into bed. His foot was still tender but not as sore as before. He’d been feeling free Then he’d walked by Zayn’s bunk on the way to his. He hadn’t noticed it at first, but in the time he spent negotiating the way to his bunk, he heard Perrie’s low mewling sounds, tinny and static-laced from the bus’ terrible Wi-Fi reception in these endless flatlands. Then there was the telltale sound of skin sliding over itself, quick and dirty. He flung himself onto his bunk willing himself to think of anything—kittens, funerals, intricate cloth patterns—but his thoughts kept circling back to Zayn. He had frantically come into hands a few minutes later, lamenting that this wasn’t over yet. 

The next two days were considerably worse for Harry. They were better for Zayn. He finally came around to the others, allowing himself long jaunts out of his bed, in the company of the others, while Harry found himself receding to the front with Lonnie. Harry refused the pieces of him that longed to out of his way to find small ways for them to be together alone to get out a few syllables that could clear the air between them.  

It was not that he could find a way for them to be alone in the first place. Whenever Zayn was around the other boys and Harry was there too, he attached himself to their sides, hands in constant contact with their bodies, like there was something sticky about them. Harry watched on, as Zayn weaved his limbs with the other boys’, counting down the minutes until the next city, struggling to find solace in his future plans. 

As he watched him below, Harry was grateful for the tinted windows that let him stare unhindered, so he could look for some indication that as to what's going on in Zayn's head but then Zayn stood up and moved to say something to Louis. Harry had pushed off from his bunk and gone in search of someone, anyone, to distract him. Niall and Lonnie had seemed like an oasis on the couch.

 

 

 

"You know," Harry says, glancing down at his skin. "It's something for the birds and butterfly to live in." Then he smiles, signaling his sarcasm. 

The only change to Niall's expression is that his eyebrows quirk upward. Lonnie, on the other hand, claps his hands together and lets out a belly laugh that practically sends Niall vibrating against him. The joy that radiates off Lonnie starts to creep into Niall's mouth, lifting its edges but fails to fully make him smile because Lonnie starts hacking. Niall turns to him and puts a hand to his shoulder, and even Harry finds himself giving Lonnie a concerned once-over. His coughs have gotten more rib-clattering in recent days. 

“When are you going to get it? When we’re in LA again?” Niall asks, once Lonnie's coughing fit subsides.  

“No I was thinking here. Somewhere.” 

Harry is about to explain his plan, how he hopes to get it tonight after they check into their hotel. They have the night off and Harry was hoping to fill the hours at a tattoo parlor he'd found online that touted the best work in the area. 

But Zayn is approaching them and Harry momentarily forgets what he is trying to say. 

“Hey,” Niall tells him. 

Zayn bobs his head at Niall and Lonnie. Harry goes hobbling backward to make room for him to pass. Zayn looks straight ahead as he goes by, trailing thee secent of cigarettes. He doesn’t acknowledge Harry’s presence.  Harry tries not to be hurt by it so he says, “Zayn” and nods his own head. 

Zayn waves his hand like an afterthought and settles next to Niall. Harry can Lonnie’s eyes shoot daggers at him as Harry watches Zayn cupping Niall’s shoulder in his hands and checking his face out like a worried mother. 

“Harry, tell him about your new tattoo,” Niall says.  

“Go on,” Niall says, encouraging him, when he hesitates. 

Harry lifts his shirt again. “Was thinking about getting a tree. Here.” 

He points out the same area he has shown Lonnie and Niall, but he drags his fingers over his skin slowly. 

“And ends here,” he says. He takes his time pointing out exactly it will be, irrespective of the other’s presence. 

The effect isn’t lost on Zayn, whose eyes are glued to his fingertips, lazily ascending with them along the side of his torso. 

“For the butterflies and bird,” Harry jokes again. 

Zayn doesn’t laugh, just nods, as he ravenously looks at his ribs. Harry thinks he might want him or he might want to chest open and make short work of his organs. 

“Should we even bother to talk him out of it?” Niall asks Zayn, the futility of it already in his voice. 

Zayn looks turns to Niall.   

“His body,” he says low and rough. Zayn has taken to talking in short phrases, his voice steady for two or three words at a time, but rasping and harsh with longer utterances. 

Harry wants to read a million things into those two words. Is Zayn telling him something? Has Zayn been thinking of his body? Has that night set things off kilter with him too? But he knows he means he doesn’t give a shit. He wouldn’t give one even if Harry decided to tattoo his initials right over his cock. 

He lets his shirt fall, feeling awkward being this exposed and unwanted. 

“Lonnie, you’ll drive me tonight?” he asks. “I found a place. Best place in the city for tattoos, apparently.” 

Lonnie chuckles and shakes his head. “Yeah I got you. But don’t even think for a damn second you can talk me into gettin’ one.” 

Harry smiles his thanks. “I’m very convincing if I want to be.” 

He turns to the boys, doesn’t miss how Niall’s shifted into Zayn’s arms more to snuggle and how Zayn’s hand rubs up and down Niall’s arm, tenderly. He tries not be too jealous. “Can I interest any of you in coming?” 

Niall snorts. “Yeah definitely. I’ll get a dick on my forehead.” 

Harry turns his attention to Zayn. “You?” 

Zayn shakes his head. “No. Andy. Party with Liam,” he says. 

“Andy’s coming?” Niall asks. 

Zayn nods. “Liam says…just flew in. Here soon…promised Liam a party.” 

“Yeah?” Niall asks and Harry knows he’s just lost any company he might have been able to finagle. 

Whenever Andy comes to visit Liam, he brings a tornado of girls, liquor, drugs and fuckery, that leaves everyone clutching their heads and their dicks the next morning, staring at the mess in their rooms, searching for the nearest place of worship to repent. He figures it will be no different this time. Liam always brings him in when they need the most relaxation, at the point when touring begins to grind their spirits out of them. 

“You sure that’s good for your voice?” Harry asks, grasping at straws. “Show tomorrow night.” 

Zayn turns to him, openly struggling to keep his face neutral. “Yes.” 

Harry thinks he can see the icicles from hanging from the word, incredibly sharp and ready to slice him open should they suddenly fall, but no one else notices. Harry wonders if this is why Zayn gets away with cheating so often—because his little cruelties can go unnoticed, unchecked. 

Harry gives him the brightest smile he can rouse. “Great.” 

“Rooms are ready!” Louis yells from the front of the bus. 

“Finally,” Niall mumbles, popping up from the couch. 

As Harry hobbles back to his bunk to retrieve his overnight bag, his toe catches the side of the couch, sending him collapsing on the floor. A hand appears to help hoist him to his feet. He doesn’t need to see the tattooed bird outline to know it is Zayn’s. He takes it immediately. 

Despite their glacial exchange a moment ago, he has to try his luck like he is a romantic comedy’s buoyant ingénue. He launches himself too far forward, as he stands, so he is flush against Zayn. Zayn’s balance falters but he ropes an arm around Harry’s waist, bracing him. His arms and chest radiate heat like a campfire, leftover from where the sun had beat down on his skin when he was smoking outside of the bus. The tip of Harry’s nose drags along the side of Zayn’s and he can smell the evidence of his cigarettes strongly on his breath. If he could just angle his face he might be able to sneak in and put his lips there to taste the tobacco and— 

“Y’all need to get off the bus,” Lonnie says sternly, behind them, preventing the sparks from catching. 

“You got it, Lonnie,” Harry says, limping in a half circle and starting back down the bus’ aisle. 

It burns in the places where Zayn’s body touched his.

 

 

###

It isn't that Zayn doesn't have ideas for dozens of tattoos that he wants, some thought out to excruciating detail, others needing to be cleared of the dust and ash in his head to be seen properly. It’s that he doesn't want to be anywhere alone with Harry, let alone a place where the sound of needle leaves him in an unfulfilling limbo of starving desire. The last time he was tattooed resulted in a complete bender, two threesomes in a night until he was on the phone choking back emotion to Perrie, cock still wet from other girls, saying that he just needed to hear her voice right now and no, he wasn’t upset. The last thing he needs is a repeat performance of the last time he let Harry get too close. 

It feels like something that happened to someone else, with someone else. It couldn’t have been his cock and Harry’s hand. That could not have been Harry’s chest that he’d finished on. It was a doppelganger who had watched Harry swallow his come down, blissed out beyond words because it felt so good. Maybe it felt good because it was a little terrifying that he didn’t know why Harry was doing this. If it was meant to rile Zayn up, to have a laugh about it later, there were hundreds of other ways to do it, ways that didn’t turn him into an eremitical asshole. 

“You know there’s a whole world outside this bunk, right?” Louis had asked him the day after, when he had refused to come out save for sustenance and toileting needs. “I mean, it’s a small world with four walls, ten wheels and a couple of singing pricks, but it’s a world.” 

Zayn brushed him off, gesturing to his phone, his computer and the personal TV as all the world he needed at that moment. Louis was persistent, offering up temptations to get him out of bed but all Zayn could see awaiting him was Harry’s smirk. He couldn’t stomach it. 

Seeing Perrie that night, letting her pretty face, her beautiful body, help him forget Harry was his singular obsession that night. The connection had barely started up before Zayn’s hands were down his pants, maneuvering his stiff cock over his pajama bottoms and beating himself before she’d even finished saying, “Hello.” Perrie’s eyes had gone wide but she was quick to meet him, losing her clothing as fast as she could and rubbing herself so wildly that Zayn narrowly missed coming on his computer screen, straddling the keyboard because Perrie always loved watching him at that angle. 

Harry hadn’t come to see him in his bunk again and had all but ignored Zayn, making him feel stupid for all the scheming he had made to keep Harry, and his body, out of his reach. When Zayn touched the other boys, his hands roaming their bodies possessively whenever they were in his orbit, he thought that his night with Harry meant nothing. Zayn had even rested his hands on Liam’s cock, just to prove to himself that he could be this superficially flirty with the lads; that everything with Harry had as much meaning as a dick joke whispered between young boys on a playing field. 

“Lost something?” Liam had asked after a chuckle. 

“Yep,” Zayn said, grinning devilishly. 

Liam had thrust into his hand once and Zayn had been delighted because there it was, the teasing without the expectation. All the springs that had coiled doubt and fear tightly to his heart came free. 

Then, outside the bus at the hotel, as his cigarette wound down to the last few drags, Liam said something that made him feel like he was going to be back on track, for good.  

"Andy's coming." Liam announced it as he kicked the ball back to Louis. 

Zayn had tried to look bored, though a sudden wave of elation hit him. He croaked, "Yeah?" 

Liam had nodded. "Should be here soon-ish. His plane just got in."  

"What’s he got planned?" Louis had asked, as the ball sailed back to Liam. 

“Not totally sure, but he says he’s taken care of it.” 

Zayn had imagined cirrhotic amounts of alcohol and girls with questionable morals in the presence of celebrities. After three days on the bus avoiding Harry and confusing himself, he had thought it was all he would ever need.

 

 

 

“Hey mate,” Andy greets Zayn, when he stops by Liam’s room. “Heard about the vocals. Shit timing.” 

Zayn had gotten bored a short while after he had settled into his hotel room. The four walls were too stifling for his nervous energy, his phone and computer providing too many portals for contact with Perrie; she was the last person he wanted to talk to. Once he heard Andy coming down the hallway with Liam, going past his door, he figured he would be able to find some diversion with them until the plans truly got underway. Whatever those plans would be. 

Zayn nods at him. “Could be worse.” 

“Yeah,” Andy says, barely paying attention. He is sitting up in Liam’s bed, bent over his computer looking lost in thought. Liam watches the screen too, from where he stands next to the bed, gawking openly. 

“Playing something?” Zayn guesses. 

Andy looks up, relaxes his brow when he realizes what he means. 

“No, mate, we’re looking at tonight’s possible guests.” He spins the laptop around so Zayn can see. 

Zayn sees everything, or as much as the camera can possibly show of a girl’s pussy. She uses her fingers to spread herself wide, her large breasts pushed together for an obscene amount of cleavage by the position of her arms. Whoever it is has an incredible body. 

“Fuck,” Zayn groans his approval.   

“Exactly,” Andy says. 

“Andy thinks I should, um,” Liam starts, but he seems to lose track halfway through. “Jesus. Her. Definitely her, too.” 

“He’s the two worst things a lad could be: homesick and horny,” Andy explains, as Zayn tries not to laugh at Liam’s reaction. “So me being here knocks out the first, and these girls knock out the second.” 

Liam nods like Andy couldn’t possibly explain it any better, then his eyes go back to the screen, widening at a new pair of tits, Zayn imagines. 

“Tweeted I was looking to have fun and the city and I got all these birds sending me pictures so we’re going to invite the fittest over,” Andy goes on. “You in, then?” 

“Yeah,” Zayn says. “Definitely.” 

Andy nods. “Still with that girl?” 

“Perrie?” Zayn grunts, offended at her designation as ‘some girl’. “Yeah.” 

Andy asks no further questions about it and the awkward silence that ensues is all anyone needs to know that this will not be a girlfriend-sanctioned activity.   

“Help us pick out some possibilities for tonight?” Liam asks him, like he’s far too overwhelmed for this by himself. 

“Yeah,” Zayn says. 

He stands on the opposite side of the bed of Liam, overlooking the slideshow of shadowy nudes. He tries not to think of Perrie as they point out girls they want, selecting them like they’re items to be savored on a menu.

 

 

 

In the end, Andy got in contact with one girl, chosen because of her perfect tits and because she boasted that she gave incredible head. 

“Finally someone who gets the point,” Andy had muttered under his breath, after he had read her message aloud. 

Zayn had felt Liam’s eyes boring twin holes into the side of his head, when he had laughed at that. 

Andy had told her the fake name to ask for at the concierge desk and ordered her to bring her fittest friends. He didn’t have to mention the name of the hotel. It was common knowledge on Twitter, the fans finding out that piece of information like everything else, with the kind of expert conniving necessary of a governmental spy. Andy had gone to his own room shortly after. 

“I need sleep before the pussy parade arrives,” he had declared. 

Zayn had taken a shower but he had gone back to Liam’s room, still damp because he toweled off quickly. Confronting his reflection in the mirror after his conversation with Perrie had been enough to send him looking for distractions, forgoing a proper dry-off. 

“Babe, I can’t talk right now,” she had said. “Filming promo stuff right now. But tonight…?” 

She trailed off with a bit of sexy suggestion in the words she left unsaid. It wasn’t enough. He had called her because he wanted a reason that he shouldn’t do anything tonight. But she gave him nothing. 

“Not sure,” he said. “Might be early night.” 

He had wanted to give a lengthier explanation but his recuperating voice prevented him from telling her more than the vague ideas of what he might be up to. If he could have said more he might have given it all away, so he had let her work out whatever made her less upset in her head. 

“Really?” she asked, curtly. “But we’re finally in the same time zone.” 

They were closer than that seemed, a few hours drive from each other. The girls were doing promotional work in Chicago and they would be meeting up two days from now, when the boys passed through. He had long thought her proximity might have impacted his behavior, reminded him to rethink his reprehensible actions, but he had learned early on, when he had fucked a girl in a hotel fire escape while Perrie was down the hall, asleep in their room, that distance barely mattered. 

“Tomorrow?” she said. Her voice had broken on the word, and made a little section of his heart tear off in his chest.  

Zayn had replied, “Yeah,” unsure himself, of whose body would be naked next to his body in the morning. Then he had gone into the shower to wash away some of the sleaze that he knows would need bleach to come away clean.   

Niall and Louis wander into Liam’s room a while after Zayn to check on the arrangements for the night’s festivities. Then they’re off to get ready, Niall remarking how he looks like shit from the traveling. As he watches them leave, Zayn wonders why they all still try. The girls would probably fuck them even if there were a cloud of two-day-old dander about them. Fame is all the shiny veneer they need nowadays. 

Liam comes out in a towel, waddling as one hand holds the side that he has tucked into itself and goes to his bag for clothes. Zayn sits on his bed, in his pants, contemplating two shirts lifted from Liam’s bag because Zayn hates everything in his. He settles on a plain white shirt that he will layer under a black denim jacket embellished with studs, and starts making his way into it. As he does it, Liam sets his towel aside to step into his pants and Zayn stops to consider this. Though his bare ass and the sinews of his body are revealed as he puts one leg through there’s none of the awkwardness like there might have been with Harry. Just thinking of watching Harry in the same position, makes Zayn grip the shirt harder. 

“So…is everyone coming?” Zayn asks, as casually as he can manage. 

Liam looks over his shoulder, as he kicks into his trousers. “Who? The lads?” 

“Yeah.” 

“All but Harry. He said something about a tattoo?” 

Zayn finishes putting on the shirt, straightens the bottom hem, hoping to seem distracted enough that he is unmoved by the news. 

“Do you think it’s a bit strange?” Liam asks. “Giving up a party for a tattoo? We haven’t seen girls for ages. He’s usually due now.” 

Zayn nods, understanding that Liam references the boys’ celibacy tolerance levels before the need to bring some pretty little thing back to their tour bus or hotel starts to become too intense to ignore. Each boy has a different limit, some shorter than others, and some, in Zayn’s case, nonexistent. They know these things like they know other oddities about each other—because they eat and sleep each other’s existence on the road. 

“Typical,” Zayn sighs, trying to not wonder if there is another reason, a reason involving him that continues to fuel Harry’s alternate plans. 

“I’m surprised you’re not going with him. To stay away.” 

It feels like a slap, this piercingly rude and perceptive estimation of what he is struggling against. He can’t form an answer, either, because he can’t admit that he won’t be good either way, and he will be less terrible with a random girl than with his band mate who makes him feel things that frighten him. 

“Worked out an understanding,” he lies. 

Liam says, “That’s great,” like he doesn’t believe him. He wrestles a bottle of cologne out of his bag. 

Zayn rolls off Liam’s bed, grabs the bottle out of Liam’s hand before he can spray himself, prompting a confused, “What?” He sprays a bit in Liam’s face to ward him off from grabbing it and maybe because he is a little annoyed that he has brought up Perrie. Liam sputters in the mist.    

“I just don’t want to do something that will make you feel shit in the morning,” Liam bursts out, unsolicited. 

“Won’t be like the girl…from Amsterdam, Liam,” Zayn says. 

Months ago in May, when Liam and Danielle’s relationship crept haltingly to the finish line, Liam had gotten stumbling drunk in Amsterdam, and he had been approached by a pretty woman who he later swore had looked so much like Danielle that he had confused himself into thinking she had come for a surprise visit. He had himself so thoroughly convinced that he went round to the others saying, “Guess who came to visit me.” They stared blankly when introduced her as Danielle and the boys couldn’t tell if he was drunk beyond reasoning or saying it to make himself feel better about cheating. He realized his mistake when she was on her knees in his hotel room working in vain at his limp dick while he gave her slack-jawed apologies and pulled the hair out of her face that, in the hotel lighting looked nothing like Danielle’s. 

Liam had called her to tell her the next morning, Zayn overhearing the whole conversation while he sat on the toilet, and then two days later it was over. Liam never came out and said he felt it contributed to the end but everyone could see it in the way he refused other girls for a while, like he was punishing himself for a moment’s solecism. It took a week’s worth of ceaseless needling from Louis to get outside of himself for Liam to come back to life, waking up from the under the crushing guilt that had him so low. 

Liam shrugs. “It’s shit when you go moody and quiet. We just got you back and I don’t want to see you like that again.” 

In that moment, Zayn knows Liam is a true friend, despite it all. And Zayn wants to admit to everything, to beg Liam for help through his desperate attempts to fuck things up with Perrie, to tell him about Harry and how he has made him go quiet these last few days, to ask him what everything means but he says, “It’s fine…tonight…it’s about you.” 

Liam brightens, his eye-squinting grin telling Zayn how much he is looking forward to this. The road has been lonelier for him this time around and the opportunities to meet anyone have been few and far between with the added shows. Zayn hands back the cologne and hopes he doesn’t look nearly as excited as Liam.

 

 

 

 

They work on a buzz before the girls arrive—Andy occupying Harry’s space in their quintet—in Liam’s room, sharing the minibar selections between them. It’s not enough to get any of them buzzed but Andy insists that he told the girls bring provisions, so they sit and shoot the shit, light-headed because of the anticipation, not the kid-sized servings of liquor.  

Zayn sits at the edge of Liam’s bed with his lips wrapped around the neck of a bottle, liquid burning down his throat when Harry knocks on the door. Niall gets up from the loveseat he occupies with Louis and lets him in. After pleasantries with Andy, the good to see you agains, Andy is offering him a drink and trying to convince him to stay. 

“I thought there were supposed to be girls,” Harry says, winking. 

“They’re coming,” Liam says. 

“You going to stay for them?” Andy asks. 

The idea of Harry staying around for this makes Zayn send another gulp of whiskey down his throat. It stings so sharply that his eyes fall closed until the aftertaste passes. When he looks at Harry again, he is smirking at him, at how his eyes are still squinting open. 

“No. I want to get this tattoo,” Harry says. “I can’t convince anyone to come with me, can I?” 

Around the room the boys are all declining, Louis and Niall shake their heads, Liam is shrugging sheepishly, while Andy looks at him like he’s making the gravest mistake of his life. Zayn lets his reticence speak for him as he shakes the last drops in his bottle. 

“Not even you, Zayn?” Harry asks. 

Zayn counts to three before he makes eye contact, to gather himself enough for a detached response. 

“No I’m staying here.” 

He means for it to sound plain but the way that the other boys turn to him, with those confused faces, makes him think he has done a shit job of it. 

“Lonnie’s waiting downstairs so I’ll be off now. Hope it’s a great time,” he tells them all, and exits as they tell him good-bye. Zayn feels something drop in his stomach, and make his chest feel heavy. It’s not unlike sadness, but he can’t understand why he would feel sad for Harry, now, getting a tattoo done alone. It’s not as if he hasn’t done the same thing in the past, and Zayn never once felt a dejected twinge. 

“Did he fuck Perrie or something?” Louis asks. “You were looking at him like you were about to murder him.” 

Zayn uncrosses his legs at the ankle and puts them straight out in front of himself. “Was I?” 

“Yeah,” Louis says. He leans in, puts his elbows on his thighs, examining him like he’s trying to work something out in his head. Zayn copies his stance but his left leg shakes the moment it hits the ground, bouncing his arm and shoulder to his nervous rhythm like he’s dancing. 

“I didn’t notice,” he says, tonelessly. 

Louis’ chest expands quickly, like he’s gathering air to blurt something out but he stops himself in time. Someone knocks at the door. 

Andy hops up from the bed and slides between Louis and Zayn to answer it. 

“You expecting girls here tonight,” a bodyguard asks, holding back sighs behind those words because he is long suffering before the party has even begun. 

“Yeah, mate. They here?” 

The bodyguard nods. 

“Showtime lads,” Andy announces. 

Zayn’s leg continues to shake while Louis stares at him like he’s slotting puzzle pieces together.

 

 

 

Eight girls show up. They stream in looking like average holidayers with suitcases, save for their short and tight attire, including the one who had sent the pictures, Cora. Her body is even more impressive in real life, perfectly endowed above and below her tiny waist, that she looks like a sweaty-palmed boy’s blueprint of a real woman’s body. As it turns out, there are two more copies of her. Triplets. 

“Look, they’re your type,” Andy tells Liam, as the girls pour into their room. “Hot cocoa mixed with milk just like you like them. And three of them, too. Your lucky day, mate.” 

Amongst all of the other girls, the triplets stand out like goddesses, leggy, with deep-bronzed skin and long curly hair that ends just below their chests. They’re not entirely carbon copies of on another; each girl is a variation on the same theme. One has wheat-streaked hair, while another is heavier than the other two with larger tits that seem ready to spill out of at her corset any moment. 

Liam hits him good-naturedly on the shoulder to get him to stop, but the girls don’t seem to notice, too busy with their suitcases. He chimes in with Niall’s polite, “Thanks for coming!” 

“Sorry we took so long!” Cora says. “They took our phones and looked through our bags for-friggin-ever. We kept telling them to hurry up.” 

“Not to worry, babe,” Andy tells her, rubbing his hands together. He looks like every inch of the wolf in sheep’s clothing he will become once the drinks start to flow. 

Zayn wonders if he looks like this, desperate and dying for it, whenever he finds someone he wants to bend over and put himself in. It is a sobering thought until one of them smiles at him, pearly white teeth between warm pink lips. He can feel his stance twinning Andy’s. 

There are one-sided introductions because, of course, the girls know who they are. Cora takes the lead and down the line the girls say their name with “Hey”s and “Hi”s tacked at the front. Some are bashful, while others openly size them up the same way the lads do. There is still reverent awe in it that Zayn has come to expect out of fans, like the boys are animals at the zoo. 

"Where's Harry?" one asks.  

"He thought a tattoo was more important than meeting all of you," Andy jokes. 

The girl visibly pouts, but the others aren't set off their stride, still excited to be in their presence. He makes a mental note to tell Harry his presence was missed, thinks he might have a laugh about it. Then he hates that he is even thinking of Harry right now when he should be working up ways to get one of the triplets out of her clinging clothing. 

“Tattoo?” asks one of the triplets, Keira or Candace. “God, I hope it isn’t at that place where that guy got killed a few days ago.” 

The lads share a grim look but then Louis says, “He’ll be fine, love. He has bodyguards.” 

“Was that the place where the artist went crazy and stabbed the guy he was tattooing? That was insane, like who--” another adds another girl and she seems like she wants to say more but she gets stared into silence by Cora. 

“Why are we talking about stabbings girls?” she says. “He’ll be fine. Anyway.” 

“So?” Andy says, expectantly. 

The other, bigger-breasted triplet shakes the top of handle of her suitcase. She bends down, pushing her ass out a little as she goes down, to unzip it and reveal liters of clear and amber colored liquor, packed among clothes to prevent the bottles from clanging together and breaking. The other girls do the same, producing enough liquor to fell an entire nation. 

“Smart lot,” Louis says appreciatively, pulling vodka from the one he is closest to. 

“We’re in a sorority,” Cora says to him, modestly waving the compliment away. “We’re professionals at getting fucked and fucked up.” 

The cap makes a scraping sound as Louis twists it open. He takes a swig of it then passes it to Niall. 

“Hey!” the suitcase’s owner says, and Louis looks chastened enough to start coming up a cheap apology but she says, “Give me some too.” 

A girl with the lightest blue eyes Zayn has ever seen, lending her a vaguely possessed appearance, opens her purse and retrieves pill bottles. She shakes them like maracas at another girl, who grins and says, “Fuck yes.” Then she pulls out plastic baggies, half a dozen pipes and a couple of one hitters. 

“Your friend told us to bring the party,” she says to Liam after his eyes widen like saucers. 

Liam and Andy end up with two of the triplets, Andy taking loudmouth Cora while Liam takes the lighter-haired one. Zayn ends up with the spare and Niall and Louis do their best to entertain the rest of the girls with a drinking game that has too many rules. 

Somewhere in their conversation, Zayn ends up with his triplet into the bathroom because the room is too loud to hear her. At least, that’s what he would tell anyone who asked. Over the weed and whiskey, he lets her tell him her—their, because it’s her sisters’ too—life story, as he is sits on the toilet cover while she lounges in the bathtub, her legs dangling over the side. She says her father moved here from Nigeria for school and had become a chemistry professor at the university in the city. He had married their mother, his college sweetheart, shortly afteward. The girls grew up around the university and now that they attended it, they spent their time getting as fucked up as humanly possible, and working at bars where the lower-cut their tops, the higher their tips. 

“And that’s how we ended up as boss bitches on campus,” Keira or Candace was telling him. He is surprised he can keep up with the story this much; lucidity gradually leaving him as the pipes started making their ways from mouth to mouth. He is glad for all her talking; it saves him from expending his vocal energy. All he has to do is say, “oh” and “yeah,” at appropriate intervals and she is off blathering again. 

“We fucking run this sorority and that fucking campus,” she says, her right arm extended with a cigarette smoldering between her forefinger and middle finger. It’s refreshing how she talks to him like she’s on his level, not jittery or wide-eyed and awkward like other fans, like the other girls in the room. 

“Name again?” Zayn asks her even though he knows he’ll forget it again. 

“Candace,” she says, without a trace of condescension, like she’s used to reintroducing herself to people over and over as a function of her two mirrored images. 

“Sorry,” he says, though he’s not, and she shrugs. 

“So Harry’s getting a tattoo?” she asks. She bows her head toward him, like she’s trying to get sensitive information. 

“Yeah,” Zayn says, offering nothing else. 

“That’s hot,” she says. “He’s hot.” 

She takes a long pull of the cigarette. As she exhales, he pinches out it of her fingers, puts it to his mouth for a drag because if he occupies his mouth another way, he won’t have to use it to talk about Harry. He looks down at her cleavage as obviously as he can, to get their conversation moving along. 

“I’d love to fuck him,” she says, not noticing. “I mean, like, I’d be lucky to fuck any of you.” 

And there it is. He is a stand-in for Harry in these girl’s heads. They all are, as usual. He almost feels sorry for them. Andy probably told them they would meet the whole band, Harry included. 

Zayn takes another drag before he hands it back over, thinking of this girl fucking Harry. She would probably insist on being on top, legs spread over his lap. It would be none of that lie-back-and-take-it fucking of the other girls they’ve met along the way. Her tits would bounce while grabbed the hair at the nape of his neck to jerk him back so she can suck on his bottom lip as she rides him. He feels an awful surge of jealousy that makes his appendages go hot, then numb. 

He throws back the remnants of his cup, some combination of juice and four different liquors that she had made for him, swearing up and down it “gets you beyond fucked up, boo.” Then he stands up and moves to the door, unsure if he should stay or go. The party is getting into the introspective stage, awaiting choices about whose bed and whose body. 

“Anyway,” Candace says at the silence.   

She slips out of the bathtub and goes to the door. She sticks her head out and screams, “Where the fuck are the pills?” to the girl who has her legs over Niall’s lap, the same one who had gone on about the tattoo murderer. Niall’s hands are stroking her thigh and their heads are slowly starting to orbit each other. It won’t be long before one of them goes in for the kill. 

“My bag,” the girl calls.

“Get it then, bitch,” she turns around to wink at Zayn like she’s trying to impress him by ordering people around, but he’s still doesn’t care. Instead her wink reminds him of Harry’s wink before he had gone. He wonders how far he has gotten into the tattoo, if it would be likely he’d be back soon, or if the needle was only getting started up the side of his ribcage. 

He wonders if Candace would drag her fingernails along his ribcage, like Perrie sometimes did, while she kept fucking herself on him. Maybe Harry would respond like he does, burying his sweaty forehead in the crook of her neck as he fucked up at her from below. 

Niall’s girl is walking toward them with a pill bottle and hands it off to Candace. “There’s only 4 left,” she says. 

Candace shrugs and turns to Zayn. “You want some of this?” 

All he sees in her shrug is the way Perrie’s shoulders would shudder as she came and then he wonders if Harry would shudder like that when he came inside Candace. Zayn blinks away the image and frowns at his empty cup like it’s defying him. 

She shakes the bottle in his face to get his attention. “Hey, you want some of this?” 

They’re white capsules, the same shape and size of the pills he has taken for a headache, but they don’t bear any writing, no brand name or dosage printed across them. 

“E?” he asks. 

Her grin is empty. “Something like that.” 

He is about to refuse her but his phone buzzes. He pulls it from his pocket. It is a text message. 

_Babe we got done with promo eaerly call me ! love you so much xx._  

Zayn considers throwing his phone into the toilet. Then he would tell Perrie that he couldn’t call her because he had gone and done something stupid—dropped his phone, not dropped another girl to her knees. But it feels too drastic. 

Candace has stopped waiting for his reply and pours a pill into her hand. She pops it into her mouth and keeps her jaw open so he can see it dangling from her pink tongue. It looks like a haven from thinking of Perrie and Harry and a doorway to devastation. 

“Fuck it,” he says. He puts his mouth over hers and licks the pill off her tongue. Then he shuts the bathroom door. 

He will tell Perrie he went to bed early tomorrow morning.

 

 

 

The head is subpar, mostly because she won’t stop interrupting it to talk. 

To herself. 

In voices. 

“This is so good. Don’t you think it’s so good?” she is saying. 

“So good! Such good dick!” she answers herself in a weak attempt at porn-voice. Zayn doesn’t know whether to laugh, or leave, or keep pulling her hair from her face while he fucks her mouth and hope that the bloody fucking pill kicks in soon. 

She pulls off to jerk him and say something else to herself he barely hears because he is looking ahead at the lines in the shower curtain’s pattern and thinking about the lines being drawn into Harry’s skin. They might be getting sliced into his skin if he ends up at that tattoo parlor that the girls were talking about earlier. 

“Yeah babe. Like, that,” Zayn says, encouraging her when she’s gone a long stretch of being quiet. She keeps working his cock, while Zayn wonders if the shop has been shut down. It has to be, right? Unless others worked there too and depended on it to be open despite the horrible circumstances. But they wouldn’t have the bloke working there anymore, would they? Then he can’t remember if the girls said he had said whether or not he had ever been apprehended. 

His heart crashes around in his chest, threatening to burst through his ribs, his muscles, his skin because all he can see is Harry being stabbed to death, run through with a rusty knife. A part of him that keeps being snuffed out like a match in the wind keeps telling him this conclusion is too crazy to make sense but he can’t hold onto why it doesn’t. 

“I have to go,” he says, his teeth chattering so hard that he can get hardly the words out. His hands miss the doorknob the first time he reaches for it. “Shit…I have to go.” 

Liam, Andy and Louis are gone along with the rest of the girls. Half-finished cups, forgotten pills, and empty bottles the only things indication that a party had been here. The room isn’t totally vacant—Niall is fucking the girl from earlier on the bed, hips pumping furiously against her arched ass. 

“Don’t freak out! It’s just the come up,” Candace is telling Zayn as he shoulders himself out of the bathroom, buttoning his pants. “You’ll be fine! It’s just the come up.” 

“What was the name? Of the tattoo place? With the knife guy?” He rubs his hand along the doorframe, the feeling so new and comforting to him in his distress. 

“Oh my God,” Niall’s girl moans. Her grimacing face is angled down at the bed underneath her, but she gasps when she realizes they have an audience. “Oh my God! Stop, stop, stop, he’s staring!” 

“What? Who?” Niall stills his movements and looks up at Zayn. “Where did you come from?” 

Zayn doesn’t spare him an answer. He stares at the girl’s face, pleading silently with her. “The tattoos…with the killer…name of the place? Please.” 

Niall’s girl moans deeply as he starts fucking her again, with slow, deep pumps. “I think it was Second Amendment Tattoos,” she pants. 

“Thanks,” he tells her and walks past their humping bodies to get to the door. 

“You don’t know he’s there!” Candace yells behind him.

“That’s the problem…” Zayn says, as he enters the hallway. The door slams shut before she answers. He dials down for one of their bodyguards, hopes he can convince him to drive. Then he texts Harry and hopes he isn’t too late.

 

 

 

###

His name is Trenton, Trent for short, according to his biography on the parlor’s website, and he is the solitary artist and owner. He looks nothing like his picture. Harry had expected a man in his early thirties, tanned and modestly-toned if the picture where he tattoos an arm is any indication, his muscles flexed as he holds the needle. The man Harry sees inside looks to be in his sixties and mildly terrifying. 

The whole place, in general, looks very different than what Harry had seen online. The storefront is unmarked, down a lonely street where all the shops have already closed for the night even though it’s barely after seven o’clock. The shop itself looks as big as his hotel room. 

“You sure this is it?” Lonnie asks when he has stopped the car in front. 

Harry checks the website again on his phone to verify he is at the right place. When zooms into the photo of Trent his phone, he realizes the photo does look a bit blurry and dated. The clothes had thrown him off. They are so unobtrusively timeless that they could fit in as well twenty years ago as they could now. 

“Should be,” Harry says. “Second Amendment Tattoo.” 

Lonnie tells him he was going to go find suitable parking so he can take a nap as he waits. 

“Gotta rest this chest,” he says. Then he starts in on a coughing fit that lasts close to minute. 

“Take care,” Harry tells him, sincerely. 

The bodyguard that Harry has brought along stands behind him, lets him lead the way. Through the glass door he sees Trent, seated at a desk facing the door. He is large and has shoulder-length silver hair that is parted down the middle. Trent pushes one side behind his ear when Harry comes in, the door playing an electric guitar riff that signifies someone has stepped inside. 

Harry smiles and looks up at the door. 

“Bad ass right? None of that _ding-dong_ shit. You enter in style, here,” Trent says. 

“It’s cool,” Harry says. He opens the door once more to hear the sound. This time Trent pretends to strum the riff. 

Harry can immediately tell that Trent has no idea who he is and he is silently thankful. It isn’t that he expects many people over a certain age to find him recognizable, but the ones with kids tend to at least give him a second glance even if they fail to place him. Trent doesn’t look at all like that and takes Harry in with a kind of neutrality that he sometimes misses. 

“So what can I do you for?” 

“I’m here to see a man about a tattoo,” Harry says, strutting and limping up to the cash register because he’s in a silly mood. This distance from the madness with Zayn is cheering him. He thinks to himself, maybe distance is all he needs, but he isn’t naïve enough to believe it.  

“We don’t do that here,” Trent says, so seriously that Harry is stopped in his tracks. Then he bursts into a laugh that is as inviting as a sledgehammer. “Come up, talk to me about it. I’m the best this city’s got.” 

As Harry approaches he sees inklings of man from the picture more clearly; his skin is damaged by years of the sun and the punishing passage of time, now. The photo also failed to capture that he has two different colored eyes, one emerald and one light blue. 

His skin is shockingly bare for his line of work except for one tattoo that runs up the length of his upper arm. They’re letters, Harry sees now, but he can’t make out what the word spells. They’re scrawled, too. No perfect calligraphy-like font, he is used to seeing in others’ tattoos. It’s vaguely unsettling, like everything else about him and this shop. 

It’s clear to Harry, from quiet that is so thick he can hear his boots’ shuffle and scrape against the floor, that there is no one else here. No artists behind the navy blue doors that are at the back of Trent’s desk, no others in the store who are scheduled to go before him. 

“But how do I know you’re good, if there’s no one else here?” Harry teases. 

Trent smiles at him sadly. “This part of the city shuts down early. And ever since this shit on the news about some tattoo artist killing his client popped up, people haven’t been coming by here as often. Place has the same name as this one, but it’s in Wisconsin. What are the odds, right? I’m thinking about renaming soon. But I’m attached to the name.” 

“That’s mad,” Harry says. 

“All my work is up there if you want to see it.” 

He gestures to the wall on his left, wallpapered with pictures of Trent posing with various clients, sporting their new ink. Harry sees the picture from his website, one of the oldest ones at the very top of the wall, surrounded by others that must have been taken around the same time. 

“I trust you,” Harry says, smirking. “Looked you up before I came.” 

“Good man.” 

“I’ve been thinking about getting something large up along here,” Harry says, touching his side through his shirt. 

Trent bobs his head and says, “Yeah, sure, sure. Come back into the office so we can discuss.” 

He puts his hand out to formally introduce himself. “Trent.” 

“Harry.” He shakes Trent’s large, cold hand. 

He gets out of his chair, inclines his head to the short hallway of doors behind him. Harry crosses behind the desk but Trent stops him short. 

“Does your friend need to come too?” 

Harry looks back at his bodyguard, who plays on his phone in a waiting chair, his expression uninterested. 

“No, he’ll stay out here,” Harry says. 

“So should I know you?” Trent calls behind him as he arrives at the second door on the right. 

“What?” 

“That’s a bodyguard right? So, should I know you?” 

“Do you have any daughters?” Harry asks, and Trent’s long silence, as he twists the door’s key in its slot, makes Harry even more interested in his answer. 

“No,” he sighs. The door comes open and he turns his key out. 

“Probably not, then,” Harry says, still curious, but he is stopped from asking anything further when Trent turns on the light. In the room is a wall full of knives. There are dozens of them in rows that run from the ceiling to the floor, from one side to the other side. 

“What…?” Harry says. 

Trent is already inside the room, opening a series of cabinets for his equipment but stops when he turns to look back at Harry. 

“Like my collection?” 

“Yeah…but after the bit earlier about the tattoo killer, I’m terrified,” Harry admits. 

Trent grows very serious, frowning at the instruments he has just taken out. “You’re right. I am a murderer.” 

If Harry has anything in his bladder, he is sure it would come coursing out, drenching his pants and running down his leg. He starts to back out into the hallway. 

Trent gazes up at him and laughs. “No, no, man. These are collectibles for the most part. Gaucho knives.” 

“Gaucho?” 

“Yeah. Cowboys from Argentina and shit.” 

Trent walks to the wall and waves Harry over. Harry takes a deep breath to calm down the part of him that wants to call Lonnie immediately and get out of here. 

The knife handles are beautiful and beautiful at an arm’s length away. They all bear different designs, each completely unique to the next. His eyes meander across each handle, winding with the patterns in one handle, dilating at the bright colors of another. One handle, a few knives over to his right, is particularly gorgeous with vertical red detailing. Sprinkled among the naked knives, with their gleaming sharp points, are ones encased in sheaths that match their handles. 

“You collect these?” Harry asks. 

“Yeah. Buddy of mine used to handcraft them. I have a couple of his here.” He points out a section of knives. “The rest I’ve collected from all sorts of places over the years.” 

Harry keeps looking. There are so many for his eyes to focus on that when he thinks he has found his favorite, another, better one catches his eye. 

“This one I stole,” Trent says, pointing to one with a light brown, boxy pattern. He looks at it fondly, and Harry knows there’s a story there but Trent doesn’t share it and Harry doesn’t press him. 

“Which one is your favorite?” Harry asks. 

Trent frowns and whistles. “That’s hard.”  He goes toward the end of the wall and bends down, to the last knife, at the bottom. It is backed next to the corner made by the connecting wall. 

“Probably this one.” 

Harry goes over to it and crouches down to get a better view. He thinks Trent will tell him he is kidding, and then show him the real one he means, because this one has a simple white handle and looks no different than an ordinary kitchen knife. 

“Got this one from someone I was with when you were probably still in your dad’s balls,” he says. 

He picks it up off of the wall and fingers it like he’s reading the braille of his memories in it. Then he hands it off to Harry. 

Harry takes it from him, its weight dashing his assumptions. This is no kitchen utensil. It’s heavy and sturdy, the curvature of the handle fitting neatly in his palm. It is well-made. 

“I used to think she gave me a knife, because she couldn’t totally give me her heart. Turns out she didn’t have one of those either,” he says, dryly.  

Trent tells about his old flame, a woman who had been married but the attraction between them had been too hard to ignore. They had tried to be noble about it. She rebuffed his advances, and he let his shame eat him up inside but kept going back. They eventually fell into each other’s arms after years of the chase. She told her husband about it the next day, to rile him up, to get him to make a big romantic gesture, Trent supposes. The next thing he knew, he was staring at the end of a rifle at work, being challenged to run as fast as he could. 

“She wanted the attention, not me.” 

Harry thinks of Perrie’s reaction she ever found out about what was going on with Zayn and what she might be compelled to do in the face of her pain. 

Despite that, Harry is saying, “I’ve been there. I’m there. Kind of. I guess.” 

Trent shakes his head at him knowingly. 

“Do these all have stories then?” Harry asks. 

“Most of them.” 

“So what’s behind this one?” He points to one at random, confident that Trent will not remember. 

Trent goes off into a story about hitchhiking through Mexico with his best friend, a few months before he had died. 

It’s like a game soon enough. Harry points to a decorative handle, then Trent tells him the tale of its origin, enthralling Harry so much that he’s sad when they end. Some stories end in heartbreak, others on a hopeful note. It goes on like this for a while, and Trent never tires of talking, or tries to get Harry to sit down so they can discuss his tattoo. Harry couldn’t be happier; it distracts him entirely from wondering who Zayn is inside of by now. 

He is so distracted he ignores his buzzing phone in his pants. He isn’t expecting anyone important now and managers know where he is. He will get it later, when he doesn’t have a trove of delightful stories to hear. 

After what must be the fortieth story, Trent looks at him, paternal fondness hazing over his mismatched eyes. 

“You want one, Harry?” 

“Really?” he asks, brows raised. 

“Yeah, I don’t have kids. It’ll be my shot at a legacy. Take one. Just not this one,” he says kicking the knife from the woman he had nearly been shot over. 

Harry contemplates the wall. He walks to one knife and then shies away from it. He turns his head from side to side. He thinks about another, but he is not sure about that one either. In the end he goes for the one with his favorite story attached to it.

 

 

 

###

He knows he has woken her up when she answers, clearing sleep out of her throat.  

"Hey babe." 

"Hey, I love you," Zayn tells her, teeth chattering still, though he tries to stop it. 

“I thought you would call earlier,” Perrie says. Then, “I love you too.” 

“Went to bed early.” 

“Then why are you up now?” 

He almost tells hers her that he’s awake and scared shitless because the girl he was supposed to be fucking has convinced him Harry is fading away in a puddle of his own deep, red blood so he is in this car, driving through Whatever, USA, off to collect Harry’s corpse on his own, with a bodyguard, because he can’t find the other lads and their managers aren’t worried even though they can’t get in touch with Lonnie or Harry right now, because Harry’s bodyguard says he is fine, and fucking hell his voice is starting to go again, and he has no idea what the fuck was in those pills but he hopes it doesn’t kill him, too. 

“Miss you,” he lies. “Needed to talk to you.” 

“I miss you too! Do you want to FaceTime in a bit?” she asks. “I can wake myself up.” 

Then, as if to spite herself, she yawns loudly. 

“Can’t,” he says, looking around the backseat. It’s too dark and they’ll be at the parlor soon, though he feels like the car is going too slow to even pass one street by the end of the night. 

“Oh,” she says. As she invents reasons why he can’t talk, he gets a lump in his throat. It’s horrible, everything he has done and will do to her again. 

“Worried about my voice,” he lies. 

“Oh babe. It’s gotten stronger in the last few days already. If you rest up more, it will be back like new, promise.” She pauses. “I wish I was there. I’d hold you so you’d know it would be fine.” 

He could never figure it out later, if it was how calm her voice sounded or the promise of being held, whether it was the loving words or how he imagined her telling him it would be fine, or if it was just the thought of being able to unravel for a moment in the midst of this madness makes him so overwhelmed with love for her that it leaves him breathless. He can’t think of any way to let her know how he feels despite the droves of pussy, the temptation in Harry. _I love you_ falls too flat; _You are everything to me_ doesn’t cover it; _I don’t know how I’d go on without you_ a valiant, though trifling approximation.  

“Should go,” he tells her. 

“Okay.” The word hangs, like she waits for something he doesn’t give her. 

“Bye, babe,” she says. 

They hang up and Zayn sifts through the fog in his head, for a way to repay her, a way to be better.

 

 

 

From the outside, the shop is dead. No one mans the desk or looks to be in the waiting area, and Zayn’s heart flies into his throat, convinced he is too late. A small crowd of girls has gathered outside, though, craning their necks to look at the shop windows in fitful spurts as they giggle to each other and text on their phones. Of course, they have found out where Harry has gone, somehow. Their presence only complicates matters, but he breezes past them with his bodyguard at his side. 

“Oh my god,” he hears, as he goes by. “Oh my god, I love you.” 

“Zayn!” another shrieks. 

“Can I have a picture, please? I will die, please!” 

“Are the others here?” one asks. “Where’s Liam?” 

They sound like they’re talking to him underwater, their exclamations bouncing onto him, echoing in his ears and radiating through his fingertips and toes. It isn’t entirely irksome, makes him feel lazy and languid, while parts of his brain are still going a mile a minute thinking of Harry’s demise.

His bodyguard staves off the advances of girls who confidently grab at him like pigeons pecking at scraps of bread, blocks a hand here and an arm there. 

The guitar riff Zayn hears when they open the door terrifies him at first. He can’t help but see it as the soundtrack to the horrors that lay beyond the desk. 

Harry’s bodyguard is on his phone, sitting in a corner, not visible from the outside. He barely registers that Zayn has entered until he calls his name. His presence is a small comfort. 

“Is he here?” Zayn says. “You checked on him?” 

“He’s at the back.” 

Zayn heads back on his own. He tries the first blue door but it is locked. At the door beyond it, he hears activity. He dashes to it, tripping over his own feet in the haste, and turns the handle. 

The situation is worse than he expected. Harry stands in front of a wall of torturous knives, next to a large man who has one pointed at him. 

“Zayn!” Harry says. His eyes light up as he waves, like he is seeing him again for the first time in decades.

“Get out,” Zayn wheezes, cursing his voice. He wishes he could yell, make a fuss, say something louder and longer to get him out of here.   

“What? No, not yet, I’m picking out a knife.” 

“Get out!” Zayn repeats, his voice going ratty at the ends with the effort it takes him to get louder. He thumbs out the door. “You need to…come back…to the hotel.” 

“Sorry,” Harry tells the man, who has the creepiest pair of eyes Zayn has ever seen. Harry goes to Zayn. 

“What’s up?” he asks casually and Zayn could hit him for being so ignorant about the danger they are in right now. “You look a little worse for the wear.” 

Zayn grabs him by the back of the neck to pull him out of the room and down the hall.  Harry goes with him easily. “Have to leave…going to kill you,” he grunts. 

Harry stops walking with him. “Wait, what?” 

“Keep going…girl I was with…said he stabbed someone.” 

Harry doesn’t take another step and Zayn holds his arms up for cover like he is expecting to block the advances of the man, wielding ten of those knives. “Go!” 

“Ohhhh,” Harry says, like something is dawning on him. “Oh. No, no. He’s not that guy. That’s a different city.” 

Zayn is so busy trying to shove Harry down the hall that he doesn’t hear at first. “What?” 

“No, he’s fine. He collects those. He’s going to give me one,” he goes on. 

Zayn’s head feels like it is about to swell off from his body like a dark balloon. While the words come to him in real time, the information behind them gets processed on a delay.

“Different city?” he struggles to say. 

“Yeah. Completely different. Are you okay?” 

“Your tattoo? Done?” he asks, slumping against the wall because he needs to catch rattling his breath. 

“Not yet. I was curious about his knives. Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” Zayn says. “Just…” The words swim away from him. 

“Does your friend need to grab a seat?” the tattoo artist is asking, half his body poking out the door as he looks on. 

“Probably,” Harry tells him. He pulls at Zayn’s bicep, so he will walk with him back to the room with the knives.

“Can he do me?” he asks blearily, as they go back to the room. “Know what I want.” Zayn thinks he is facing Harry but he finds himself talking to the wall instead.

“Ask him,” Harry says. He points to Zayn as they re-enter the room. “He thought you were that killer you were talking about.”   

The man starts to laugh, so horribly discordant in a way that makes Zayn grit his teeth for a while after it stops. “It’s an honest mistake, I’ll give you that.” 

“He wants something done, too,” Harry explains. He helps him sit in the tattoo chair, Zayn going down like he’s falling. 

“Does your friend talk?” 

“Of my girlfriend,” Zayn saws out and turns to the man. He hopes his face looks sober but is pleading enough for him to give in. 

Something changes in Harry’s face and makes his careless smile look plastic. 

“Harry was here first, and I technically should be closed,” the man says. 

“He can do it instead of me,” Harry says. 

“I don’t think if he’s in any position to make that decision right now,” Trent mutters. 

"No, Trent, he's fine," Harry covers for him. "He's just a bit mopey when he wants to be. About his girlfriend." 

Zayn thumbs up, to cosign Harry's assessment, though he still feels light-headed. He glances at his hands; they don’t feel like his own. 

Trent, the man's name Zayn supposes, is hesitant while he wipes down the knife Zayn saw him handling with Harry earlier. Its handle is white with a black design in the middle that looks like a sound wave. "Talk to me about this piece you want. Girlfriend?" 

"I need her…here…on my arm." He puts his fingers on his right upper arm. "I need it."  

"Her face?"  

"All of her…have a picture," he says, remembering one he is fond of. It is one that he enjoys looking at from time to time when it has been too long since he has last seen her and needs the boost.  

He flips through his phone, finds the one, and holds it out. "This." 

Harry looks askance at the picture then blinks and looks off. Zayn wonders if it hurts him, but he hurts Perrie so much worse when Harry is around.  

Trent takes his phone, studies the photo. "An exact replica?" 

He shakes his head. "Inspired by that…want it to…capture her..." 

"Capture her essence?" Harry spits out like bitter liquid.  

"Yeah." 

Trent studies it longer and hands it back. Zayn waits for him to make a pronouncement, his life dependent on it.  

"I can do something like that. Why don't I sketch up an idea and you tell me what you think?"  

He reaches for a notepad by the chair, flips some pages and begins to trace out his plans. As his hand moves across the page his shirt's sleeve rises and reveals a section of his arm. Letters scrawl up sideways that Zayn can’t make out. 

"What does…that say?" 

Trent's head pops up. "What?" 

"Your arm," Harry adds, similarly curious.  

Trent turns to his arm and chucked when he realizes what they mean. "It's a name, Felicia." He rolls the sleeve up. “The woman from the white handled knife.” 

“You did that after everything?” Harry asks, amazed, and Zayn realizes he is missing part of the story.

“Sometimes you need a souvenir. God knows I did, just like your friend here,” Trent says. He bends back over the pad, sketches out more.

 

 

 

The tattoo takes close to an hour and a half. Harry watches him the entire time across the room, playing with his knife. He runs it, sheathed, along his arms, puts it to his thighs, and up over his chest, like he is drawing something on himself. Zayn idly wonders if Harry’s clothes would fall apart under the blade and averts his eyes because Harry catches him looking. By the end of it, his mouth is parched, likely a horrible combination of the pill and whatever the fuck Harry is doing to himself. 

“It’s perfect,” Zayn says, when he gets a chance to see it in a mirror. 

Trent shrugs, self-effacingly. “Would you mind if I got a picture of it for the wall?” 

Zayn shakes his head and Trent pulls a camera from the cabinet. He gazes at the tattoo of Perrie, on his arm, when the photo is snapped. 

It takes another half hour for Trent to bandage him up, to finish cleaning off Harry’s knife, and shut down the shop. Harry and Zayn stay to help him get things locked away, and jokes that they should leave before the rest of the band he has killed them too. He is an interesting man, Zayn thinks. He might have really liked him if his head wasn’t so fractured right now. 

They call Lonnie to come for them, waiting inside until they see the car pull up. There is an even larger crowd outside of the shop now, more girls clawing at the windows to get closer, screaming whenever the boys go up to the glass and make faces at them for fun. Harry imitates one girl who texts making the girls caterwaul some more. 

Trent bids them a farewell as the black SUV shows up, honking. Harry waves his knife goodbye and Zayn nods at him. 

Their bodyguards charge them through the crowd, jostling to keep girls away. They throw Zayn and Harry into the backseat of Lonnie’s car and close the door. They stay behind for the car Zayn had taken over to bring them back to the hotel separately. As Lonnie drives away, careful not to mow down any fans, Zayn hopes they make it back before this endless night gets more bizarre.

 

 

 

“Was worried. About you,” Zayn admits. They haven’t said anything since they have been in the car, other than to answer Lonnie’s question, that yes, they are ready to go back to the hotel for good.   

“Worried? About me?” Harry parrots. “You’re not my mum. I was fine.”

“He had a wall…of knives.”

“He wasn’t going to use them on me. He gave me one!” 

“Not what I heard.” 

Harry starts to laugh. “You’re mad at me because you got so fucked up tonight you thought a tattoo artist hacked me up to death, even with Lonnie and a bodyguard. And you thought that because a girl you fucked said she thought she saw something like that on the news in a different city?” 

“Same name…she thought it…was here,” Zayn says, but when Harry lays the scenario out like that, he can’t help but realize how utterly ridiculous it is too. He hears Lonnie stifling back a chuckle himself. 

“At least it was a successful trip for you. It’s a pretty tattoo,” Harry says, flitting his fingers along Zayn’s arm, over the bandage. “Does Perrie know?” 

Zayn shakes his head. 

“You don’t think that won’t look obvious? That you just did something wrong?” 

“I did nothing wrong,” he says. An aborted blowjob doesn’t count, he thinks.

“Yet,” Harry murmurs, doubt in his voice like he fully expects Zayn to go off with someone the minute they get back. 

“I can be good,” he shoots back.

“Can you?” 

Zayn doesn’t answer because he can’t answer. Yes, the tattoo was a rash decision, the idiot parts of his head forming the idea helped along by the most love-drunk parts of him that removed reason from the equation. His arm’s soreness seems to intensify when he thinks of telling her about it, how she might connect all the dots and see it as the consolation prize it really is. 

“Don’t know.” 

“Thank you for your coming to my rescue,” Harry says, sliding across the seat and nuzzling Zayn’s neck. 

Harry’s arm nestles next to Zayn’s, pressing on his sore skin and it’s an aching reminder of all he cannot lose. 

“You scare me,” Zayn says, unsure if it’s the pills or the buzz from the pain making him so open. “Really fucking scare me.” 

Harry looks up at him, seriously. “Why?” 

“Don’t know…what you want.” 

From their position, Zayn can’t tell what Harry’s eyes betray in the shadows, but he feels his lips quirk at the corners. “I want something?” 

The coquettish act kills him. “Fuck you.” 

It is silent; the sound of the engine and Lonnie’s hoarse coughs are the only noises, until Harry admits, “Maybe.” 

“What?” Zayn rasps. “What?” 

As a flare of streetlights illuminates the car, Zayn sees his left hand on Harry’s leg. He doesn’t remember putting it there. Zayn feels Harry shrug, making his arm smart again, and he groans at the pain.    

“Sometimes I could—“ Zayn starts but he has no idea what he means to finish with. Hurt you? Kiss you? Fuck you? Die a little because you’re ruining everything with Perrie? His recovering voice is a blessing to keep him from saying more. 

As if Harry can hear his thoughts, he goes into his pocket, retrieves Trenton’s knife. He pulls the sheath away and its blade shines brightly when it catches the light. 

“Sometimes you could use this?” 

Zayn feels Harry smile against his neck as he eases the knife into the hand he has rested on Harry’s leg. He pulls away so he can get a good look at Harry and sees nothing but taunts in his eyes, poised on his lips, in the way his head tilts.

“I want you to,” Harry whispers. 

Zayn takes the knife with less hesitation than he would expect from himself. Then he remembers something. 

“Lonnie. Privacy glass,” Zayn barks. 

Lonnie looks back at them in the rearview mirror but makes no move to touch the button. 

“Lonnie—“ 

“Zayn, I’m not doing nothin’ like that. We ‘bout to be at the hotel anyway.” 

“Lonnie, we’ll put it up ourselves ourselves if you don’t. Just put it up and keep driving until we tell you to stop,” Harry says, staring at Zayn. “Please.” 

Lonnie exhales slowly and for a moment, Zayn doesn’t think he’ll give in. But the window rises slowly. 

At first, Zayn continues to look at Harry looking back at him. Then he slides himself closer on the seat, fingers his shirt. He doesn’t care about cutting it because it’s probably his shirt anyway. Right now he needs him out of it. As fast as possible. He wiggles the knife along Harry’s collar, pushing down slowly. The top of it gives away like it’s butter, the blade slides down so smoothly down the t-shirt that the last section of fabric seems to fall apart in defeat. 

Zayn puts the knife’s handle between his teeth so he can smooth the sides of Harry’s tattered shirt away from each other. When Harry’s chest is sufficiently bare, he takes the knife into his hand again. He leans in, his tongue sliding across Harry’s chest seeking his nipples. Finding one feels like a major victory and he sucks it deeply, alternates sucking and tonguing and biting, in a way that leaves Harry whimpering. Zayn goes to the other nipple as Harry’s hands find his hair. 

Spurred by his hands, Zayn teethes at Harry’s nipples, more forcefully than he means to but Harry’s response is somewhere between discomfort and pleasure and he can’t—won’t—separate the two right now. 

When he comes up for air, Harry’s eyes are dazed, but he is cognizant enough to try to kiss him. Zayn pulls back in time and he sends up a silent prayer that he doesn’t draw blood.

 

 

###

Harry tries his best not to look desperate for this. He runs his tongue along his lips that feel parched as Zayn consider the knife. The car hits an unexpected bump. They bounce toward each other, the knifepoint landing at Harry’s heart. A millimeter more and the tip would have been buried in his chest. 

But he isn’t scared. Yet. 

Zayn turns it until the knife so it’s blade faces the seat and drags it down Harry’s chest and lower abdomen, slowly. It hitches at the top of his jeans, and Harry thrusts his hips up to it, all fears gone. 

Then Zayn bypasses the zipper and continues the knife’s descent over part of his hard dick that doesn’t curve over toward the left, aching against his trousers, right down over his balls, to rest at the notch where the two halves of his jeans are sewn together. 

Now he is a little scared. And a lot turned on. 

Zayn takes the knife away. “Turn around,” he whispers in Harry’s ear, his hot breath tickling the hair that hangs over it. 

Harry spins in a half circle, bending his right knee into the seat so that he can sit facing away. He feels Zayn’s hands run down the small of his back and grab a fistful of his jeans. Then there’s a gradual loosening of where they squeeze his hips and where it’s tight against his cock, as he feels Zayn drawing the knife down. When it cuts down as much as it can before it hits the seat, Zayn stops. Harry is about to look back at him but he sees Zayn’s arms reach through his, and undo his fly. 

He rubs his hand over Harry’s dick before he pulls away completely and Harry moans in relief that perhaps this time he’ll get a scrap of gratification. The top of Harry’s jeans falls away from his sides in pieces. 

Harry sees the knife in front of him, Zayn saying, “Now, you,” against his neck. 

He moves back and Harry turns around again. He isn’t sure what clothes Zayn wants him to cut off of himself next. He goes to cut away the remnants of the top of his jeans, start to work on his boxer briefs but Zayn grabs his wrist. 

He pulls Harry’s wrist upward so that the blade is centered on Zayn’s Adam’s apple, pointy against the protuberance. From his tight grip Harry can tell both of them pray they don’t hit another bump. 

“Down,” Zayn whispers and lightly applies pressure so the blade slips to his collar and begins cutting through the shirt. As his shirt falls open, the cupid’s bow of the tattooed lips coming into view, Harry removes his hand, nestles his lips over it and kisses it. He knows it’s the closest he will get to Zayn’s mouth tonight. 

There’s pressure at the top of his head and that he thinks might come from Zayn’s lips as he kisses his head but he chalks it up to wishful thinking. He pulls away and sets the knife at his chest where the rest of the shirt hasn’t been cut but rethinks the plan and goes to Zayn’s right shoulder. He slits down the length of the sleeve, revealing the bandage at his tattoo and Harry kisses over it, making Zayn hiss as he peppers the rest of his arm with kisses. 

The two sides of the sleeve lay in scraps on either side of his arm. Harry spends his time tonguing the designs at his forearm like he has wanted to for ages. 

Zayn moves his hand over his dick, touching himself over his jeans. Harry pulls his hand away and replaces it with his own, massaging him while he continues to kiss down his arm, listening to Zayn’s breath catch. Harry sits up once he reaches Zayn’s wrist and undoes Zayn’s trousers with one hand while he holds the knife in the other. 

Zayn lets him do it without a fight. They are used to this part at least. When the jeans part and reveal the band of his boxer briefs, Harry hooks his index finger on them and levels the knife over band, ready to cut through. 

Zayn seems to hold his breath, fearing the worst, a bloody dick, so Harry says, “Trust me.” 

The knife splits the cotton easily, exposing Zayn’s thick, dark pubic hair. Harry takes the knife away and rips it the rest of the way, nearly dropping the knife on Zayn’s stomach as he does. 

“Don’t want to die…for this,” Zayn says. He puts his hand over Harry’s for added security that the knife won’t fly out of his hand. 

“Then you shouldn’t have given me the knife,” Harry says and he bends over to laugh against Zayn’s shaft. He licks it just to tease and then guides it into his mouth with his free hand. Zayn exhales deeply as Harry takes him in as far as he can go. 

Harry up and down his cock, spends some time tonguing the head and tasting Zayn’s saltiness, reveling in it. He takes him in for another go, bobbing his head this time as he jerks at the base. Zayn’s hand goes slack where he helps to hold the knife. Harry steals a glance upward, and sees Zayn’s head fall back against the window. His jaw hangs loose, as his lips work to find each other and keep himself quiet. 

Harry turns his attention to the task at hand, keeps sucking and jerking. He feels Zayn lifting his hand and the knife, bending it toward Harry’s face and then the tip of it hits his forehead. Harry stops, lips still wrapped around Zayn’s cock, to figure out where the knife is headed. He rolls his eyes upward and Zayn smiles a dazed smile at him. Then he scrapes the knife down Harry’s nose. Harry crosses his eyes to see when the blade comes to the bridge of his nose. 

“Keep going,” he rasps. “Won’t hurt you." 

Harry flattens his tongue against Zayn’s cock as he takes him deep again. Zayn groans and keeps guiding his hand so the blade continues off his nose, then veers it to the side so it pulls at the skin under his eyes slopes skipping down his cheekbones where his cheeks suck in and skate down to his bottom lip. 

Zayn watches the whole time, though he fights to keep his eyelids open. 

Harry pulls off and sits up. “This isn’t fair,” he says, staring down at Zayn’s glistening cock. “You have to give me something.” 

His dick feels so hard and heavy he thinks it won’t take much. He uses the heel of his knife-wielding hand to get his hair out of his eyes, newly fallen because of his position over Zayn’s dick. 

Zayn reaches his hands to the front of Harry’s cut jeans, pulls the torn flaps away and down. Harry shifts his hips so Zayn can pull the jeans lower and get his boxer briefs down. As he frees Harry’s dick, Zayn jerks him, palming his the wetness gathered down. 

“Get…on top,” he says.  

Harry hardly understands him, keeps sitting there fucking Zayn’s fist. Zayn puts his palm behind Harry’s neck to pull him forward. Harry manages to grip the back of the seat without stabbing either of them as he puts his other hand against the door to lean over Zayn. 

Zayn pulls his own pants down his thighs enough to give himself more access. Then he licks his hand, his tongue heavily with spit, and lines their cocks together to jerk both of them. Harry bites down on his bottom lip to keep from moaning loudly. 

He strokes both of them, the sensation from his hand and from the way his cock rubs against Zayn’s, making Harry feel sparks at the bottom of his feet. Zayn concentrates on the task, fast and slow, then fast and faster still, until he starts to clench up in anticipation of his final go. 

“Cut it up,” Zayn is panting as he continues to jerk them and Harry’s eyes are crossing at the pleasure. 

“What?” 

“Cut it…hurry,” he whines. 

It takes Harry a second to realize he means his shirt. He yanks a handful of it it in the middle and slits it from the bottom up, exposing the skin up to Zayn’s navel. It’s sloppy work but the shirt is split enough to give Zayn room to come on himself without telltale evidence on his shirt. 

And he does, moaning with his forehead grounding into Harry’s clavicle. He comes over his hand, and comes onto his lower abdomen, comes over onto Harry’s dick getting him wet too. Zayn’s hand slowly strokes out the rest of his come before stopping completely, and lets them both go. Harry hits the seat, frustration making his eyes prickle, so close to the edge. 

Harry thinks Zayn has stopped for good now, but he jerks Harry the rest of the way, head still on his chest while he kisses along the top of Harry’s chest, from one side to the other.

“Put your mouth on me?” Harry says. He knows he is being more forward than he knows Zayn will tolerate, but now that Zayn has shown the desire to even do this with him, he has to beg, just to see. “Please. Fucking. Please.” 

Zayn stills his jerking and pushes Harry back. He flops backward shoulders bumping the other door as he goes down.   

“Oh god, that’s it,” Harry says as his hips jerk up into Zayn’s mouth with his orgasm. “That’s. It.”

He doesn’t say anything else and allows himself to ride out wave. Zayn doesn’t pull off his mouth, as he expects. He sucks through it, taking in what he can, though Harry can feel it getting messier, dripping back on his cock. 

Zayn finally pulls away, straightens himself to sit up. His lips are glazed from the spit and the come, his bottom lip plump and wet, his stubble around his chin and cheek shiny. He looks so stormy that Harry lunges for him, has to get his mouth on those lips to head off the maelstrom but Zayn anticipates him. He takes Harry’s fist around the knife’s handle and swings it in front of Harry’s face. The blade comes at him so quickly that Harry closes his eyes, expecting the end of his life, here in the backseat of this car with his cock out. The presses will have a field day with this, won’t they?

But the blade touches his skin, with a fraction less force to pierce it.

“No,” Zayn says, darkly. Then he lets Harry’s hand go. 

“I can’t,” he says, his face twisting up with emotion. 

Harry nods. He understands but he won’t give up. 

Harry taps the privacy window with the blade. “Lonnie. Home,” he calls. 

When they leave the car, they hold the shreds of their clothes together with their hands, Harry concealing Trent’s knife under his armpit, behind one of his flexed arms.

 

 

 

 

 

_Got that knife a day before I was committed into a mental hospital, Harry. I was going to use it to kill myself. I thought I’d go out by one of my favorite things in the world. I went and drove by her house, when I knew her husband had gone away for the weekend, so there wasn’t a chance I’d get shot at again. I still stalked them enough to know he had a fishing trip that weekend. I was pathetic back then._

_I stopped the car outside of her house, across the street, had my knife in the passenger seat ready for me. I thought I’d slit my wrists and throat and die in the car. I thought she’d leave her house the next morning, see my car parked outside and come closer and then she’d breakdown when she saw me dead. I wanted my bloody body to haunt her dreams forever after all she did to me. My heart was so broken._

_But I couldn’t do it. I used to think I was too scared to die, but I think it was these kids in her neighborhood. They wouldn’t stop riding their bikes up and down the street. And they’d look in the car window like peeping their heads in and shit. They kept laughing when I told them to go away and coming back and doing it again. And I couldn’t kill myself with kids watching. That’s a horror no kid should see. So when they wouldn’t leave, I just drove back home. Didn’t go back either. Just drove home, packed a bag, and drove myself to the hospital and told them I was sure I was going to kill myself if I didn’t get help._

_That was a fucking dark time. But I got over her. Eventually. I didn’t think I would. She ruined my life. That was twenty-six years ago. It’s the first time I’ve thought of that in a long time. So I guess that knife to me, it represents that our feelings for other people aren’t forever. They might be shitty and confusing and unbearable at the time but we’ll move on. At some point. It’s hard to think that when you’re still fresh from the birth canal. But the heart is so capable of change that we almost have to._

_I wish I learned that earlier but the best I can do hope you can learn it from me. Maybe it'll save you from screwing things up just to break your own heart._


End file.
